PreCivil War New Orleans Essay Research Paper

Pre-Civil War New Orleans Essay, Research Paper

HistoryPre-Civil War New OrleansNew Orleans is a city in southern Louisiana, located on the Mississippi River. Most of the city issituated on the east bank, between the river and Lake Pontchartrain to the north. Because it was built on agreat turn of the river, it is known as the Crescent City. New Orleans, with a population of 496,938 (1990census), is the largest city in Louisiana and one of the principal cities of the South. It was established onthe high ground nearest the mouth of the Mississippi, which is 177 km (110 mi) downstream. Elevationsrange from 3.65 m (12 ft) above sea level to 2 m (6.5 ft) below; as a result, an ingenious system of waterpumps, drainage canals, and levees has been built to protect the city from flooding.New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, and named for theregent of France, Philippe II, duc d’Orleans. It remained a French colony until 1763, when it wastransferred to the Spanish. In 1800, Spain ceded it back to France; in 1803, New Orleans, along with theentire Louisiana Purchase, was sold by Napoleon I to the United States. It was the site of the Battle of NewOrleans (1815) in the War of 1812. During the Civil War the city was besieged by Union ships underAdm. David Farragut; it fell on Apr. 25, 1862. And that’s what it say’s in the books, a bit more, but nothing else of interest. This is too bad, New Orleans , as a city, has a wide and diverse history that reads as if it were a utopian society built tosurvive the troubles of the future. New Orleans is a place where Africans, Indians and European settlersshared their cultures and intermingled. Encouraged by the French government, this strategy forproducing a durable culture in a difficult place marked New Orleans as different and special from itsinception and continues to distinguish the city today. Like the early American settlements along Massachusetts Bay and Chesapeake Bay, New Orleansserved as a distinctive cultural gateway to North America, where peoples from Europe and Africa initiallyintertwined their lives and customs with those of the native inhabitants of the New World. The resultingway of life differed dramatically from the culture than was spawned in the English colonies of NorthAmerica. New Orleans Creole population (those with ancestry rooted in the city’s colonial era) ensured notonly that English was not the prevailing language but also that Protestantism was scorned, publiceducation unheralded, and democratic government untried. Isolation helped to nourish the differences.From its founding in 1718 until the early nineteenth century, New Orleans remained far removed from thepatterns of living in early Massachusetts or Virginia. Established a century after those seminal Anglo-Saxon places, it remained for the next hundred years an outpost for the French and Spanish untilNapoleon sold it to the United States with the rest of the Louisiana purchase in 1803. Even though steamboats and sailing ships connected French Louisiana to the rest of the country,New Orleans guarded its own way of life. True, it became Dixie’s chief cotton and slave market, but italways remained a strange place in the American South. American newcomers from the South as well asthe North recoiled when they encountered the prevailing French language of the city, its dominantCatholicism, its bawdy sensual delights, or its proud free black and slave inhabitants; In short, its deeplyrooted Creole population and their peculiar traditions. Rapid influxes of non-southern populationcompounded the peculiarity of its Creole past. Until the mid-nineteenth century, a greater number ofmigrants arrived in the boomtown from northern states such as New York and Pennsylvania than from theOld South. And to complicate its social makeup further, more foreign immigrants than Americans cameto take up residence in the city almost to the beginning of the twentieth century. The largest waves of immigrants came from Ireland and Germany. In certain neighborhoods,their descendants’ dialects would make visitors feel like they were back in Brooklyn or Chicago. From1820 to 1870, the Irish and Germans made New Orleans one of the main immigration ports in the nation,second only to New York, but ahead of Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. New Orleans also was thefirst city in America to host a significant settlement of Italians, Greeks, Croatians, and Filipinos. THE AFRICANS:African Americans compile about half of the city of New Orleans population to date. How didthis come about. Well, during the eighteenth century, Africans came to the city directly from WestAfrica. The majority passed neither through the West Indies nor South America, so they developedcomplicated relations with both the Indian and Europeans. Their descendants born in the colony werealso called Creoles. The Spanish rulers (1765-1802) reached out to the black population for supportagainst the French settlers; in doing so, they allowed many to buy their own freedom. These free blacksettlers along with Creole slaves formed the earliest black urban settlement in North America. BlackAmerican immigrants found them to be quite exotic, for the black Creoles were Catholic, French orCreole speakers, and accustomed to an entirely different lifestyle. The native Creole population and the American newcomers resolved some of their conflicts byliving in different areas of the city. Eventually, the Americans con