Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

by Garvey, John B.

  Hanno Delier tells us that these “Arkansas Germans,” on their descent to New Orleans, must have met their fellow countrymen, the D’Arensbourg Germans, who had just settled there. This was undoubtedly a determining factor in their decision to accept Bienville’s offer of the land in the area. The descendants of those early settlers still live in the area first called “La Côte des Allemands,” and later “Des Allemands.” These early German settlers brought much stability to the colony with their successful farming and were better able to endure the climate than the French.

  There was a shortage of unmarried women in the colony, and the men were forced to take Indian squaws as brides.

  “Send me wives for my Canadians,” Bienville wrote to Paris. “They are running in the woods after Indian girls.” In 1721, eighty-eight girls from a house of correction in Paris, La Salpêtrière, arrived in the city under the care of three Gray Sisters and a midwife, who was nicknamed La Sans Regret.

  Within a month, nineteen had married and ten died, leaving fifty-nine to be cared for, which was not an easy task, as they were girls who “could not be restrained.” They are to be distinguished from the Casket Girls, who did not arrive until 1728. The latter came to Mobile and Biloxi to be wives to the settlers. They were from good middle class families, and they were skilled in housewifely duties and excellent of character. The Ursuline nuns claim that there is no historical basis for the story that they came to New Orleans.

  Some of the concessionaires that came to work their own land are worthy of mention.

  The Marquis de Mezières from Amiens, France, built his home in 1720 at the present site of the Petite Salon on St. Peter Street.

  Claude-Joseph Dubreuil de Villars and his family arrived in New Biloxi in 1721. He later settled in the Tchoupitoulas, near the location of the present Ochsner Hospital. There, with his family and ten servants, he grew rice and indigo. By 1724, he had an avenue of trees and, by 1725, two indigo factories, which produced ink and dye. He became contractor for the Mississippi Valley. He built the first levee in New Orleans and a canal between the Mississippi River and Bayou Barataria, the location of the present day Harvey Canal.

  Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, (1695-1775), was born in Holland and came to Dauphin Island in 1718, after having served with the French army in Germany. In his three-volume work, Histoire de la Louisiane, he tells of settling a plantation on Bayou St. John, then moving on to the Natchez country, where he spent eight years. He wrote of their lives and customs, leaving the most accurate account we have of these original inhabitants of Louisiana. After sixteen years in America, during which time he served as manager of the Company of the Indies and manager of the King’s Farm, which dealt in slave trade at Algiers Point, he returned to France where his books were published in 1758. They were, and still are, a treasure-trove of early Louisiana history.

  Antoine Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, born at Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1772, was the stepson of Ignace Broutin, the royal engineer. He built a beautiful summer home in 1788 in Mandeville, a town north of Lake Pontchartrain, which bears his name. His grandson was Bernard de Marigny, a colorful Creole of New Orleans.

  Other names of early settlers were Villère, de La Ronde, and Delery.

  It is interesting to note that most settlers were less than five feet three inches tall. The average height was five feet. The average age was twenty-one years old. There were few over fifty, and few in their teens.

  Before the hurricane of 1721, the city is described by Father Pierre de Charlevoix in one of the first hundred letters written from New Orleans. He wrote that there were a “hundred barracks,” placed in no particular order, a wooden storehouse, and two or three houses “which would be no ornament to a village of France . . .” He also wrote that he felt the city would be the “future capital of a fine and vast country.”

  The city of which he spoke consisted of 470 people living on three streets, which had been laid out by Pauger. The hurricane of 1721 devastated the town and destroyed all the buildings.

  In April 1722, the first complete plan for the city of New Orleans was signed by Pierre Leland de La Tour, who dispatched Adrian de Pauger to supervise the construction of the city. The area on which La Tour planned to build was scattered with wooden houses built by immigrants from Illinois. Pauger cleared a strip of land on the river wide enough and deep enough to put the plan into execution. The hurricane of 1721 had taken care of most of the original buildings, which were not in keeping with the engineer’s plans, and would have had to be removed in any case.

  Then with the help of some piquers, he traced on the ground the streets and quarters which were to form the new town, and notified all who wished building sites to present their petitions to the Council. To each settler who appeared, they gave a plot of 10 fathoms front by 20 deep, and as each square was 50 fathoms front, it gave 12 plots in each, the two middle ones being 10 front by 25 deep. It was ordained that those who obtained these plots would be bound to enclose them with palisades, and leave all around a strip of at least three feet wide, at the foot of which a ditch was to be dug, to serve as a drain for the river water in time of inundation (French 1853, 23-24).

  First parish church of St. Louis, designed by de Pauger. Dedicated Christmas Eve, 1717, on the site of the present St. Louis Cathedral. Drawings reconstituted from plans in French National Archives. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  The streets were laid out in a grid pattern, and they were straight, not conforming to the curve of the river. The exact site of the Vieux Carré today is the place Bienville chose in 1718, and the spot where the St. Louis Cathedral is today was the location of the St. Louis Parish Church. The wooden church was blown down in 1723, but in 1724, construction of a brick church began on the same spot.

  Map of the Vieux Carré, May 26, 1724, from de Pauger’s city plans of 1721. Shows additional houses constructed after the September 1, 1723, overflow. Shaded houses erected first. By Adrien de Pauger.

  New Orleans, May 15, 1728. From the original map by N. Broutin, deposited in Office of Marine and Colonies, Paris, France.

  Map of New Orleans, 1803.

  The map shows the plan of the city with its limits and its street names. From left to right, vertically, the streets were Canal, Iberville, Bienville, Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans, St. Ann, du Maine, Clermont (changed to St. Philip), Rue Arsenal (changed to Ursulines), Hospital (changed to Governor Nichols), Barracks, and Esplanade. The original city ended at Iberville Street. (Our present Vieux Carré Commission had no jurisdiction past Iberville.) The streets Conti, Toulouse, and du Maine are the names of King Louis XIV’s illegitimate sons.

  Reading from top to bottom, horizontally, the streets were Rampart, Bourgogne (changed to Burgundy), Vendome (changed to Dauphine), Bourbon (family of the king), Royal, Condé (an extension of Chartres, later changed to Chartres), and Rue de la Levée (changed to Decatur).

  Map of the Vieux Carré

  The Place d’Armes fronts the church, jail, and the priest’s house, (now the Cathedral), flanked by the Cabildo and the Presbytère. Barracks were on either side of the square, moved by a later governor to a location beyond the Ursuline Convent on Barracks Street.

  New Orleans was a city bounded on three sides by swamps and on the fourth by the river. A levee was built on the river side, and drainage ditches were dug to allow the water from the river to drain around the city to “Back of Town.”

  A description of eighteenth century New Orleans, from History of Regional Growth:

  At high tide, the river flows through the streets. The subsoil is swampy. New Orleans becomes famous for its tombs. Buried coffins must have holes so that they do not float to the surface when the land is flooded. Dikes have to be built along the river . . .

  Those living in the city dedicated to the Duke of Orleans feel as if they were living on an island in the middle of a mud puddle. (New Orleans Regional Planning Commission 1969, 5).

  Alongside the river were
high banks covered with great cypress forests, occasionally broken by the home of a concessionaire or an Indian village. Buildings were constructed of thick wood with sloped roofs like Norman houses in Canada. Galleries were later added for cool comfort and the protection of the exterior against decay.

  The French in Louisiana, gregarious by nature and possessing a remarkable ability to adapt, settled in groups instead of seeking solitude, as much for social ability as for safety. They were predominantly traders, not farmers. Unlike the American frontiersmen, they built large and comfortable substantial houses of hewn timber or brick. They were survivors, and they were here to stay. Their attitude is reflected in the types of homes they built.

  The Code Noir of 1724

  In 1719, the Company of the West brought an influx of slaves into Louisiana. By 1724, there were so many slaves and free people of color in the colony that the French government enacted a set of laws called the Code Noir, or Black Code, whose purpose it was to protect the slaves and the free blacks and to define and limit their activities. It governed the treatment of slaves by their masters. Slave owners were ordered to have their slaves baptized Catholics. They were not to work their slaves on Sundays or holidays, except for marketing.

  The Code was not as cruel as it is often made to appear. It provided more lenient treatment of slaves than could be found almost anywhere else in the south. It was the basis of Louisiana slave laws until the late 1820s, when the state adopted parts of the much more severe slave codes of the southeastern states (Taylor 1984, 12).

  New Orleans, the Capital of Louisiana

  Bienville had tried as early as 1719 to have the Louisiana seat of government moved to New Orleans, but the Superior Council argued that it should be transferred back from Mobile to Biloxi. The Council won. Biloxi, however, had just burned down and was abandoned for the other side of the bay. In 1722, three commissioners arrived in the colony, charged with the administration of the Company’s affairs after John Law’s failure. In 1723, the commissioners allowed Bienville to make New Orleans the capital of Louisiana.

  The Ursuline Nuns Arrive

  It was Bienville who had laid the groundwork for the coming of the Ursuline nuns, although he was “between terms” and not in the colony when they finally arrived. A school for boys had already been started by a Capuchin monk, Father Cecil, where the Place d’Armes Motel stands today on St. Ann Street across from the Presbytère. Bienville tried to get the Soeurs Grises (Gray Sisters) from his native Canada to come to New Orleans to teach the girls, but he failed. He consulted Father Nicholas Ignace de Beaubois, Superior of the Jesuits (however few there may have been) in Louisiana at the time, who advised him to try to procure the services of the Ursuline nuns. Bienville did so, and twelve nuns arrived on August 7, 1727. Their Superior was Mother Tranchepain, and among them was the talented Marie-Madeleine Hachard, to whom we owe a charming description of the journey and the city in 1727. Their first convent was built in 1730.

  In February 1724, Bienville was ordered to return to France to render an account of his conduct. Disagreements between Bienville and his Superior Council had always existed, and the officers were successful in having him recalled. During his second administration, he had taken Pensacola in 1719 (though it was returned to Spain in 1723), undertaken a war against the Natchez and defeated them, and begun negotiations for the coming of the Ursuline nuns. Nevertheless, he was replaced by Governor Étienne de Périer, who arrived in 1725.

  The old Ursuline convent.

  The Natchez Massacre

  During Périer’s administration, a great war with the Indians took place. In 1729, the Natchez were ordered by the commandant of Fort Rosalie, a vile little man named the Sieur de Chépart, to abandon one of their finest villages, the White Apple, in order that he might establish a plantation there. The Natchez Indians decided that they would never have peace until they destroyed the French at Fort Rosalie. On November 28, 1729, they surprised the fort, killing two hundred men. They took women, children, and slaves as prisoners.

  The Choctaws allied themselves with the French, killing many of the Natchez and recovering some of the prisoners. Then the Choctaws dispersed.

  The Natchez entrenched themselves and resisted for some time. Finally, they escaped to a mound in the Black River, leaving their prisoners behind. On November 15, 1730, Périer left with 650 soldiers and 350 Indian warriors for the Black River. He brought back 427 prisoners, who were sent to Santo Domingo and sold as slaves. The rest of the tribe was adopted by the Chickasaws, and the Natchez name was lost forever.

  When the children who had been orphaned in the Indian War arrived in New Orleans, the Ursuline nuns began their orphanage. They also put bars on the windows of their convent (which still remain today) in fear of a similar Indian attack in New Orleans.

  The war with the Indians had been too costly. In 1731, the Company of the Indies gave Louisiana back to France. In April 1732, Louisiana became, once again, a royal province. The population at this time numbered five thousand whites and two thousand blacks in the entire territory. France removed the duty on goods coming from France to Louisiana in order to stimulate trade.

  In 1732, Bienville returned for his third term as governor. This third administration was a disaster because of war with the Indians. Bienville was forced to make war on the Chickasaws, and hostilities did not end until April 1740. In 1743, Bienville asked to be relieved of his command and returned to France. He was sixty-two years old and had spent approximately forty-four years in Louisiana.

  Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal

  Bienville’s successor was Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, called the Grand Marquis. While it is true that he brought culture, elegant manners, and elaborate entertainment to the colony, such pleasures were available only to the wealthy. His administration was filled with nepotism in political appointments, misuse of army provisions for personal profit, trade monopolies, and general neg-ligence of duty. His wife, the Marquise de Vaudreuil, looked quite elegant driving her “imported from Paris” four-horse carriage around New Orleans, but once inside the governor’s palace, she engaged in selling of drugs, and the governor shared the profits.

  A good picture of the times is painted in the report of the ceremony honoring Vaudreuil’s appointment as governor of Canada. Kerlerec was host at a dinner for two hundred guests followed by a remarkable show of fireworks. To ignite the display, two doves were released by Madame Kerlerec and Marquise de Vaudreuil. In their beaks, the doves carried lit tapers to set the extravaganza ablaze.

  And so, a more accurate account of Vaudreuil’s term would be ten years of political corruption and Indian wars. He kept up the enmity between the Chickasaws and the Choctaws, and civil war broke out among the former. Receiving reinforcements from France, Vaudreuil undertook an expedition against the Chickasaws in 1752, which accomplished little except for the devastation of their country.

  Vaudreuil was, however, the first governor to establish a real levee system in New Orleans, which offered some relief and protection from floods. He also suggested colombage as a method of construction. This method employed a heavy framework of squared timber filled in with either bricks, briquette entre poteaux, or a mud-and-moss mixture, bousillage. You can still see evidence of bousillage construction in French Quarter buildings. He suggested that buildings be placed three feet off of the ground, and that they be built no higher than two stories and constructed with galleries.

  At the time of Vaudreuil’s administration, the Jesuits had settled on the plantation Bienville abandoned when he returned to France. It ran from Canal Street to Felicity Street and included the site of the present Jesuit Church on Baronne Street. It was in that area in 1751 that they planted sugarcane sent to them by the Jesuits in Cuba.

  In 1753, Vaudreuil left to become the governor of Canada. He was replaced as governor of Louisiana by Louis Billouart, Chevalier de Kerlerec. Kerlerec was nicknamed Chef Menteur (Chief Liar) by the Indians. This wa
s the name originally given to the stream that meandered beside the present day highway of the same name through the Rigolets to the Lake and on to the Gulf. It was the “Chief Liar” among streams because its current flowed deceptively in either direction with the tide. The Indians seemed to understand Kerlerec very well.

  Governor Kerlerec had violent disputes with his commissioner, Vincent de Rochemore, who accused him of being a dictator and of robbing the treasury. Kerlerec, in turn, accused Rochemore of theft and neglect of his duties. These conflicts, together with a laissez-faire attitude toward the colony, made progress impossible. The unsuccessful wars of Louis XV limited the help that could be given to Louisiana, and the poor financial policy of the colony caused instability in the currency. In 1761, Kerlerec was recalled to France and thrown into the Bastille, but his friends managed to secure his release.

  The French and Indian Wars had been going on in North America since 1689. The last of these four wars, from 1754 to 1761 (although the treaty was not signed until 1763), involved a conflict between French and British possessions in the New World. In this war, Colonel George Washington fought against the French in the Ohio Valley. Louisiana was almost a forgotten territory. No new colonists came. Few ships or supplies arrived.

  The Acadians

  In Acadia (later called Nova Scotia), which had been won by the British at the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, the British and the French Acadians had been living side by side in peace for half a century. Now, the British feared that if Acadia were invaded, the French Acadians would fight against them. Therefore, the governor demanded that the French Acadians swear allegiance to the British crown and give up their Catholic religion. They refused and were exiled. Many of these excellent farmers, after a lengthy odyssey, found new homes in Louisiana during the period of Spanish domination.