The Accidental City

Lawrence N. Powell

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068933
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"Should stand for years as the definitive history of New Orleans's first century." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post This is the story of a city that shouldn't exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America's most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city's history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric—and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel.Powell's tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

1

AN IMPOSSIBLE RIVER

THERE’S A PLACE ON THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI, twelve miles below the French Quarter, or Vieux Carré, where the serpentine river makes an abrupt westward shift before curling back on its southeasterly course toward the Gulf. The horseshoe bend got the name “English Turn” shortly after the Canadian-born Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, bluffed an English sea captain into turning around and sailing out to sea in mid-September 1700. A former midshipman and now a lieutenant in the French navy, Bienville was only nineteen years old at the time. He had been descending the river with five men in two canoes when he chanced upon the English corvette moored at the bend, waiting for favorable winds to continue upstream. It would be the first of many Anglo-French confrontations in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The warship carried ten guns and a well-armed crew; on board were a group of French Protestant dissenters—Huguenots—whom the English intended to settle on the banks of the Mississippi, part of a larger contingent that had been ferried from England the year before to temporary winter quarters in the Carolinas. Bienville told the English captain he was trespassing on territory already claimed for France; and, besides, he wasn’t on the Mississippi River. This was a different river, also claimed by France. Bienville ordered him to leave, adding that there was sufficient force nearby to compel his departure should arms prove necessary. The British captain weighed anchor, threatening to return with more firepower. He never did. In Bienville he had instantly recognized the younger brother of Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, whose prisoner he had become following the latter’s brilliant naval victory in Hudson’s Bay during one of the chronic wars of imperial and dynastic rivalry that convulsed Old and New World alike in the age of European settlement.¹

Like Pocahontas’s rescue of John Smith from death by clubbing, or like the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock, the English Turn story is one of those origin yarns that open the pages of glorious histories aching to spring forward: Here is Bienville himself, the future founder of New Orleans, still a teenager, hoodwinking the representative of a great maritime power, and saving the Lower Mississippi Valley for French control—if only for six more decades. Even at that tender age he possessed the political skill and savoir-faire that usually served him well during his almost forty-year span of leadership in French Louisiana. If the story has a moral, it’s that it took someone of Bienville’s geographic genius to locate, on a river averse to staying in its banks, the perfect site for a world-class port and storied metropolis.² The previous March, he and his brother Iberville had stopped at New Orleans’s eventual site while ascending the river for the first time. An Indian guide had brought their small party to a short portage connecting the river with a sluggish stream, later called Bayou St. John, which fed into Lake Pontchartrain. Strewn with baggage, the road was passable because of all the canoe bottoms that had been dragged along it. From Lake Pontchartrain, they were told, it was possible to sail through another passage into yet another lake, and thence to the Mississippi Sound where their fleet lay anchored. Eventually, New Orleans would arise at the river end of that portage.³

New Orleans prides itself on being an old city. Indeed, compared to Sunbelt meccas, it is venerable. But among North American colonial towns, it was a late arrival. Its problematic site is a principal reason. Geographers and historians are fond of characterizing New Orleans as “the impossible but inevitable city.” The site was dreadful. It was prone to flooding and infested with snakes and mosquitoes. Hurricanes battered it regularly. Pestilence visited the town almost as often. But New Orleans’s situation—its strategic location near the mouth of one of history’s great arteries of commerce—was superb. Before the construction of canals and especially of railroads enabled farmers, millers, and manufacturers in the Mid-west to ship their products directly to the East, the river floated their crops, goods, and wares to the Atlantic Coast and points beyond. During the city’s lush decades, just about everything the Mississippi Valley sent to eastern markets had to pass through New Orleans, as did all the buttons and textiles, shoes and wine, that mid-America received in exchange. It was as though the city were the drain plug in an immense bathtub. And as the basin released its bounty, so the city’s coffers swelled. Geographers and historians give Bienville a lot of credit for recognizing New Orleans’s stupendous situational advantages early on, notwithstanding the swampy drawbacks of the site itself. Yet, in fact, it took almost two decades for Bienville, and the French generally, to act on his inspired foresight. The first French garrison on the Lower Mississippi (Fort de Mississippi, or Boulaye), erected hurriedly after Bienville’s English Turn heroics, was nowhere near present-day New Orleans. It was thirty miles downriver, and it soon got washed out. When Bienville first recommended establishing a permanent agricultural settlement on the Mississippi, he suggested placing it near Baton Rouge.⁴

The colony’s early capitals weren’t even on the river, let alone near present-day New Orleans. They were at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and, after 1701, in the environs of Mobile, Alabama, many miles to the east. The capital was transferred in 1717, but not to Louisiana. It was placed at Biloxi (in present-day Mississippi), on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, across from a barrier island the French had renamed Ship Island. Here it might have remained had many of Bienville’s fellow officials, men with whom he quarreled almost ceaselessly, had their way. Only Bienville and his supporters wanted to relocate the capital to the New Orleans site. He had cleared that location in the spring of 1718. But the groundbreaking was hardly the end of the story. Three years of bureaucratic infighting would pass before Bienville’s New Orleans was chosen, almost with a sigh of resignation, to be France’s “principal town” on the Lower Mississippi.

In truth, the founding of New Orleans had less to do with the imperatives of geography than with the cunning of history. The town was the unintended consequence of the world’s first stock market crash, the notorious Mississippi Bubble. But for its bursting, New Orleans might have been built in the shadow of Baton Rouge, at a now largely forgotten bend in the river known as Bayou Manchac. This was where officials in France, whose word was supposed to be final, had wanted to put it. Bienville fought for its present-day location because he had large land concessions there. Geopolitical clairvoyance had little to do with his site selection; self-interest, everything.

New Orleans’s founding was always fraught with challenges and shifts in direction, like the sinuous river on which it perched. The first Europeans even had trouble finding the river, particularly its mouth.

The oxbow bend a dozen miles below New Orleans where Bienville sent the English packing is a geological newborn. It started forming only about 600 years ago, as the apex of a seaward-advancing sludge of alluvium called the Plaquemines deltaic complex. The larger floodplain to which it belongs—starting where the Atchafalaya River forks to the south, seventy river miles above Baton Rouge, and ending at the Mississippi’s birdfoot delta at the edge of the continental shelf—is but one of several such deltaic formations that have sculpted this landscape in the present era. The land here is young, no older than 7,200 years, so youthful that geologists can double-check the radiocarbon dating of their soil borings against archeological pottery shards. New Orleans perches on acreage consolidated about 4,000 years ago, a half-century after pharaoh Khafre erected the Great Sphinx of Giza near the banks of the Nile. Younger still is the high ground by the French Quarter, whose crust dates to the Mississippi’s last shift in course, at its juncture with Bayou Lafourche, around 1400 C.E., during the dawn of the European Renaissance. There is no Precambrian schist in these parts, no basement rock of any kind—in fact, no hard minerals whatsoever except fine gravel, and you usually have to drill down deep to find it. Because it is embryonic terra firma, its surface dynamism has constrained where and when human settlement could find purchase.

The Mississippi’s meandering has done most of the sculpting. “It is not a commonplace river,” according to Mark Twain, its most illustrious biographer, “but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.”⁵ The river acquired these wondrous qualities during the Pleistocene Era, about 2 million years ago, when the first Ice Age rejiggered the plumbing system of mid-America and rendered the Mississippi embayment a great sluiceway for the meltwater and outwash of a teeming continent. Since then every river between Montana on the Pacific Slope and Delaware on the Atlantic shore, including the Ohio, Tennessee, and Missouri, as well as minor tributaries and braided streams in between, has drained into the Mississippi. As a result, the river became engorged with staggering amounts of water and vast quantities of dirt (it carries a historic average of more than 2 million tons per day). As glaciers advanced and retreated, and sea levels rose and fell, the Mississippi down-cut into entrenched valleys that eventually became plugged with sediment when climatic conditions changed. Deltas grew and got buried, new terraces formed and overlapped. And slowly the Mississippi Embayment—that vast alluvial valley that opens up near Cairo, Illinois—began filling with strata of erosional dirt stolen from the upper Mid-west and points beyond: altogether 1,280 cubic miles of the stuff, or the equivalent of 1,280 mountains, each a mile high, a mile wide.⁶

The Mississippi Embayment is a slightly downwarping valley, however. Between southern Illinois and the Atchafalaya River in southern Louisiana, where the Mississippi alluvial valley merges with the deltaic floodplain, the decline in elevation is a mere 285 feet. But that drop is a plunge compared to the river’s gradient thereafter, when the slope flattens out to a mere seven inches per mile. Meandering rivers such as the Mississippi are by definition sinuous, and this one, as it nears the Gulf, may be the crookedest in the world. And among the most unstable, too. As the serpentine Mississippi strove to shorten its distance to the sea, it slithered across its lower floodplain like a garden hose that had been turned on high and dropped accidentally on the lawn. The river sliced through several of its coils and loops, stranding some of those loops and creating oxbow lakes. Several times it shifted sideways, in the modern period marooning some river towns in their agricultural hinterland, and drowning others in the encroaching currents.

Those currents are as unpredictable as they are powerful. There is never a single current—there are always several, each one moving at variable speeds and on different levels, sometimes in contrary directions. Where the river’s turbulence crashes against concave banks, it can shear them off like a sharp knife through soft butter. Where the currents slacken as they graze a convex bank, they deposit new soil, sowing shorelines called “battures.” If the flood stage is high enough, the pressure on the concave bank can cause a breach, like an aneurysm rupturing an artery. Called “crevasses,” the breaches usually splayed into sediment fans but sometimes widened and deepened into distributary streams, some of them bayous (marshy or very slow-moving watercourses), to carry off the river’s overflow. And if, over time, one of those distributaries began capturing more and more of the overflow, it might preempt the main stream and start building its own deltaic complex. This, more or less, has been the geological process by which the south Louisiana floodplain took shape: first, a delta would push its mud toward the Gulf in one direction, ironically lengthening the distance the river had to travel to reach the sea; and then the meandering Mississippi would surrender to gravity and head for the Gulf by a shorter route through one of its distributaries, triggering delta formation in a new direction.

Though the Mississippi is a prodigious land-producing machine, very little of what it deposited in New Orleans was fit for human habitation. This is partly because the new land was mud, and mud compacts. Away from the river the new land was little more than organic muck, and here it sank atop submerged peat and relict sand dunes to form the backswamp, some of it forested, most of it marshy. Only near the Mississippi’s banks, where annual floods dropped coarser, heavier material, did accretions of new land mound up sufficiently high to accommodate human purchase. But even here it wasn’t all that elevated: a mere fifteen feet above mean sea level in front of the French Quarter. This is the natural levee (from the French noun une levée, meaning “a lifting,” “a raising,” and by extension “an embankment”).

These half-hillocks aren’t confined to the river, however. You find them everywhere it has flooded—along bayous and other distributaries, active and abandoned, for example. South Louisiana’s deltaic landscape is literally welted with them. One of them is the Metairie Ridge–Bayou Sauvage (or Gentilly) distributary, which cuts diagonally across the center of the city before dipping toward the Gulf. Though the Metairie distributary has long since filled its channel, its natural levee, rising ten to twelve feet above the adjacent land, forms the lakeside rim of New Orleans’s famous bowl-like topography. Following heavy rainfalls and storm surges from the Gulf, a small lagoon used to pond up in the saucer-like depression between Metairie Ridge and the river. Bayou St. John—that backdoor route to Lake Pontchartrain pointed out to the Le Moyne brothers by their Native American guide—is actually a tidal creek that geological processes notched midway through the ridge to allow the impounded rainwater to drain off toward the lake.

It was on these ridges and welts that the area’s first human occupants, Indian nations, large and small, built their settlements. They pitched them on natural levees that experience told them were least likely to flood. But all their abodes were temporary, like the land itself. According to the archeological record, Native Americans were constantly pulling up stakes and moving villages and campgrounds because of the threat of inundation. In the Greater New Orleans area alone, anthropologists have identified dozens of abandoned Indian camps, distinguishable by their middens of oyster and clamshells, the detritus of prehistoric diets.⁷ The first Frenchmen in Louisiana were not hunters and gatherers, however. They intended to stay put. But where? Rivers are controlled at their mouth, the strategic narrow of commerce. But the Mississippi offered up few choice sites until settlers reached the rolling bluffs of the Pleistocene terrace at Baton Rouge, 200 miles from the Gulf. This was daunting land. With the possible exception of the Volga in Russia, Europeans had never seen a river quite like it.

For a long time, they weren’t able to see it at all. Most North American rivers that flow to the sea empty into large bays, which are basically canyons gouged out by retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age and then invaded by rising oceans. The continental shoreline is pitted with these estuaries. They are easy to make out from offshore. But the Mississippi’s deltaic mouth, which is often shrouded in fog and bordered with alluvial plumes of sediment, is practically indistinguishable from the minor streams and bayous that spider seaward through the marshy coastland. For nearly two centuries, Spanish ships yearly brushed the Louisiana coastline en route from Vera Cruz to Havana without once recognizing the discharge of a prodigious stream. Extant maps of the upper Gulf Coast were misleading. From earlier explorations and Native American lore, Spain knew that a large river flowed into the sea somewhere along its northern shore, but their charts showed it emptying into the Bay of Espíritu Santo, in present-day Texas. What did catch their eye when they skirted the Mississippi’s birdfoot passes were cones of fluid mud that had been pressured to the surface by river silt piling up on the ocean floor. Where the cones broke the water’s surface, early Spanish mariners mistook them for “black rocks” or palisades of “petrified trees,” and they gave them wide berth except when salvaging nearby shipwrecks loaded with bullion. Oozing dark blue sludge, some of the “mud lumps” lurking just below the ocean’s surface were known to erupt with enough flatulence to lift passing ships completely out of the water.⁸

It is therefore unsurprising that when Europeans finally discovered the river’s obscured mouth, it was by voyaging downstream. Even then they were flummoxed by what they had found. The remnants of Hernando de Soto’s disastrous 1541–1542 expedition, which had stumbled upon the river somewhere near Memphis, Tennessee, thought they had emerged into a giant bay when their rude craft eventually shot them into the Gulf by way of one of the river’s passes.⁹ Nor did René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Canadian explorer and prosperous fur trader who finally did discover the Mississippi’s mouth, have a clear conception of what he had found. With forty-one European and Indian companions, La Salle reached the mouth on April 6, 1682, after a harrowing six-week canoe trip.¹⁰ The naming ceremony—after his sovereign, the Sun King, Louis XIV—took place three days later and several miles upstream from the marshy passes. Claiming for France both the Mississippi and its vast drainage basin, including all of its Indian nations, plus assorted bays, estuaries, mines, and villages, the explorers planted a Cross, sang the Te Deum and the Exaudiat, fired their weapons, and shouted “Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!” (“Long live the king!”). No other European colonizer matched the French in the theatricality of its possession-taking rituals, which were carryovers of coronation ceremonies that harked back to medieval France. The processions were elaborately choreographed, down to the color and cut of the clothi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 An Impossible River
• 2 A Landjobbing Scheme
• 3 Utopian by Design
• 4 Improvising a City
• 5 Changing of the Guard
• 6 In Contraband We Trust
• 7 A Creole City
• 8 Slavery and the Struggle for Mastery
• 9 The Slaves Remake Themselves
• 10 A New People, a New Racial Order
• 11 The American Gateway
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index