Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans

by Garvey, John B.

  Jean Lafitte

  Lafitte had been preying on Spanish shipping and other vessels in the Gulf since 1806 under a letter of marquee from Latin American countries, which somehow legalized his piracy. His base was at Barataria in the swamps to the south of New Orleans.

  Jean Lafitte’s blacksmith shop.

  A constitutional prohibition against the importation of slaves in 1808 played right into the Lafitte’s hands. At Barataria, he held slave auctions once a week, at which he sold hundreds of slaves that were then smuggled into the city. Cutting New Orleans merchants in on his profits from all merchandise made them reticent to prosecute him. At his peak, he had a mansion, a fleet of barges, and one thousand men at Grand Terre.

  Hundreds of tales of Lafitte; his brother, Pierre; Dominique You, a former gunner for Napoleon Bonaparte; and Renato Beluche, a future Rear Admiral in Gran Colombia’s navy and now buried in Venezuela’s Pantheon of the Heroes of Independence, have been fictionalized beyond recognition, but no one doubts that the pirate was one of the most colorful characters in New Orleans history (Grummond 1983). From his blacksmith shop on Royal Street, he plotted his illegal seizures and the sale of contraband.

  As early as 1813, Claiborne had issued a proclamation offering a $500 reward for Jean Lafitte’s capture. The brazen pirate issued his own proclamation offering $1,500 for the capture of Governor Claiborne. Pierre Lafitte was imprisoned, but Jean organized a jailbreak to free his brother. Somewhere along the line, Jean Lafitte turned patriot. It was at this point that he passed the information on to Claiborne that the British had approached him.

  General Jackson was incensed that Lafitte’s stronghold had been bombarded by the Americans. He was afraid that now, the pirate would turn against the United States.

  In September 1814, General Jackson defeated the British in Mobile, and in October, he turned them back in Pensacola. He received letters from Claiborne explaining his poor defenses, the prevalence of spies, and other problems.

  Colored lithograph of the Battle of New Orleans. By John Landis, 1840. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  When Jackson received word in November 1814 that British troops were gathering in Jamaica for an invasion of Louisiana, he left for New Orleans on November 22, just days ahead of the British, arriving in the city on December 2. He began setting up his defenses at once. Batteries and earthworks were erected at the Rigolets Pass, Chef Menteur Road, and the other two forts below the city, one on each side of the river, thus protecting the approaches to the city by water. He then ordered his troops to stand by in Mobile, Natchez, and Baton Rouge in case the British attacked by land.

  He recruited every man who could bear arms. He accepted the help of the “free black” military units, who were to distinguish themselves in battle. Then, he invited Lafitte and his pirates to join him in fighting the British, promising full pardons in return for service. Lafitte and his pirates arrived with flint, muskets, and other arms and ammunition.

  On December 22, British forces began moving across Lake Borgne to Bayou Bienvenu and set up camp on the Villere Plantation. On the night of December 23, Jackson made a surprise attack on the weary British army. It was a brilliant strategy, and the Villere Plantation was captured.

  In the last week of December, the British brought in fresh troops and supplies. Jackson had recruited every available man and put them to work building a line across Chalmette between the river and the swamp, marked off by a wall of cotton bales. Everyone came to help: Choctaw Indians, pirates, free blacks, and Creoles. By the time the British under General Sir Edward Packenham had regrouped, Jackson’s line was finished. With a reinforcement of two thousand Kentuckians, Jackson had about six thousand men, three thousand of whom were at Chalmette.

  Packenham’s first advance on December 28 was met with heavy artillery fire and stopped. Then, early on the morning of January 8, 1815, when the fog lifted, the Americans, crouched behind their cotton bales, could see neat lines of brightly clad soldiers advancing in their direction with drummers, bagpipes, weapons, and ladders with which to scale the earthworks.

  Jackson gave the order to fire, and his Kentuckians with their long rifles fired, reloaded, and fired again. The British line crumbled; Packenham reassembled his men and charged again, but for the second time, the British troops were mowed down, and Packenham himself was killed. His Major General John Keane took up the leadership of the British and drove them back into battle. Once again, they were decimated, as was General Keane. The British broke and ran.

  When the battle ended, two thousand British had been killed, and the American army had lost seven men. It was an unexpected and staggering victory. Shallow graves were dug for the British dead, and their wounded were treated in New Orleans hospitals and homes. On January 27, the British left New Orleans, never to return as enemies.

  Statue of Andrew Jackson in Jackson Square honors his heroism. (Courtesy Kathy Chappetta Spiess)

  The Battle of New Orleans was unique in American history. It brought together people of many ethnic backgrounds of every social stratum to fight for a common cause, the defeat of the British: Acadians from the bayous, Germans from the German Coast, slaves and free blacks, Creoles, Kentuckians, Tennesseans, and buccaneers from Barataria all manned guns under the oaks at Chalmette. It was there that they amalgamated to become the American Army in New Orleans and proved themselves a force to be reckoned with.

  Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, later became president of the United States and led the nation into a new era called the Jacksonian democracy.

  The British troops then fought against Napoleon, defeating him at Waterloo. Governor Claiborne died two years later at the age of forty-two. Lafitte then moved his privateering operations to Galveston Island from 1816 to 1820. In 1822, Lafitte learned that Simon Bolivar was commissioning private armed vessels into the Colombian state service though no longer granting letters of marquee. On August 19, he was assigned the forty-ton schooner General Santander. On February 4, 1823, Lafitte engaged Spanish ships off the coast of Honduras, and sometime after dawn on February 4, he died at age forty-one (Davis 2005).

  When news reached New Orleans that Napoleon had escaped from the island of Elba, where he had been exiled, Mayor Nicholas Girod offered sanctuary to the deposed ruler. Napoleon, however, regrouped his army, was defeated again, and this time, was exiled to St. Helena. Once more it was announced that Napoleon would be made welcome in the city. The Napoleon House on Chartres and St. Louis Streets was supposed to have been prepared for his stay, while he recruited and planned his next move. The Baratarians, including Dominique You, his former gunner, were to rescue him in a ship purchased by a wealthy group of New Orleanians, but just days before their departure, Napoleon died.

  We often read that the Battle of New Orleans was the battle that was fought after the war was over, since the Treaty of Ghent, Belgium, had been signed December 24, 1814, ending the war with England. A delay in communications prevented Packenham’s receiving the news, and so his army attacked at Chalmette. The treaty, however, specified that the fighting was to continue until the treaty had been ratified and exchanged, and it was not ratified until a month after the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson declared that he would remain in New Orleans, that martial law would continue, and that the militia would be kept on the alert until official word came from Washington. On March 13, 1815, word reached New Orleans. Jackson then returned home to Nashville and the British troops left the area.

  Chalmette Battlefield. (Courtesy Kathy chappetta Spiess)

  It was the Battle of New Orleans that broke America away from Europe and denied Britain’s hopes for colonial possessions in the New World. The Battle of New Orleans ended an era in the city’s history. Survival was no longer the city’s main objective—she had survived. No longer a tool of strategy or a pawn of empires, New Orleans was a valued port city in a growing country, willing and able to contribute to the growth and strength of the United States of America.

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bsp; CHAPTER VI

  Progress in a Period of Peace: 1820-60

  From 1810 until the Civil War, New Orleans was the largest city west of the Appalachians. Its population tripled in the first seven years that it was an American city (1803-10). Over the course of the next fifty years, the city enjoyed a period of growth, expansion, prosperity, and change. New Orleans became a boom town in a period of peace, reaching for the fulfillment of its destiny.

  Favorable circumstances came together between 1820 and 1860 to make the city grow and prosper. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the granulation of sugar in 1795 made these two products inexpensive and available to all. Their production increased a hundredfold, creating a plantation aristocracy in the South. By 1860, two million bales of cotton were crossing New Orleans’s wharves annually. The coming of the steamboat presaged a whole new era of transportation and trade. The river became a highway for steamboats laden with cotton, sugar, and other cash crops on their way to Europe and South America and with manufactured goods on their way back.

  People of all nationalities and backgrounds crowded the levees and markets, enjoying the new availability of flour, meat, lard, grain, agricultural products, game, and seafood of all kinds. Ships arrived with building materials, lumber, pipes, and lead. The wharves were lined for miles with steamers, schooners, and flatboats.

  Steamboats

  For a brief time, the inventor of the steamboat, Robert Fulton, and his partner, Robert Livingston (the American negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase), enjoyed a complete monopoly of steamboat commerce on the waters of the west, a privilege they had wrested from the territorial government. In 1814, however, the monopoly was put to the test. Captain Henry Shreve arrived in New Orleans with his own steamer, the Enterprise, and the ship was seized by court order. General Jackson was in New Orleans at the same time, preparing to defend the city against the British. He sent Captain Shreve and the Enterprise upriver for supplies, thereby temporarily averting a showdown. Later, however, in April 1817, by court order, the Livingston-Fulton monopoly was ended forever.

  The Steamboat Era

  The Golden Age of steamboating on the Mississippi lasted only fifty years, from 1820 to 1870. But in those years, steamboats won a unique and revered place in American folklore. Authors, poets, and songwriters have made them the settings of their works—and with good reason. They were as ornate as wedding cakes. They rivaled the finest hotels of the times, boasting bars, barber shops, orchestras, lounges, restaurants with gasoliers and the finest china, carpeting, and even their own newspapers. The tall, stately vessels gleamed white in the sun, churning through the muddy Mississippi with their twin paddlewheelers and their double smokestacks. Rooms on steamboats were called staterooms because they were named for states that existed in the period.

  The captain ruled his boat like a king, the pilot knew every snag and shoal in the ever-changing river, and the engineer was able to keep the engines churning in spite of all kinds of difficulties. When the steamboat whistle sounded, townspeople rushed to the riverbanks to watch as goods and passengers embarked and disembarked.

  Some steamers were of prodigious size. The Henry Frank deposited its cargo of 9,226 bales of cotton at the New Orleans levee on April 2, 1881. Hundreds of draymen readied their teams and their floats, or drays, to haul away the flood of merchandise brought downriver on the steamers. Levees were lively with peddlers, female vendors, beggars, and machine pitchmen. According to J. Dallas in the Levee—Third Municipality in 1854, “the busy hum of labor, voices of every tongue . . . boxes and bundles, pork and bananas, mules and beautiful women, Yankees and ruffians, Indians and Dutchmen, Negroes and molasses, all huddled together in Babel-like confusion, presenting a picture of life and abundance nowhere else to be seen in the world.” The list of riverboat passengers included businessmen, vacationers, and the inevitable gamblers, who made or lost a fortune at the felt card tables of the salons.

  Sidewheelers gave way to sternwheelers, which were sturdier, simpler, and more economical to operate, even if they were less beautiful. Steamers that served regular routes were called packets.

  During the Civil War, steamboats were replaced by gunboats, and after a brief resurgence following the war, were replaced almost entirely by the faster, more functional railroads.

  Keelboats, flatboats, and steamboats carried merchandise to New Orleans following the American Revolution. (Courtesy Leonard V. Huber Collection)

  Showboats were floating theaters, offering shows appropriate for the whole family. They presented songs, dances, and dramatic scenes. The first showboats were keelboats and flatboats that drifted downriver with troupes of players. Every showboat had a calliope that called river dwellers to the docks, where actors gave a sample of the treats in store for those who had the price of admission.

  Eugene Robinson’s Floating Palace of the 1890s consisted of a museum, a menagerie, an aquarium, and an opera. Actors often dropped a line to fish between performances, and more than once, a player missed his cue while landing a catfish.

  The showboat operator usually sent an advance man to announce the ship’s coming. Although the movie Showboat depicted a self-propelled vehicle, showboats were usually towed into ports.

  Banking Institutions

  The growing business activity in the port city caused a growth in the number of banking houses, insurance companies, commission houses, and cotton and sugar factories. As early as 1811, the Bank of New Orleans and the Louisiana Planters Bank were established. By 1827, there were five banks in the city, including a branch of the United States Bank. They were financed by banking institutions in England and the Northeast.

  Faubourg Sainte Marie

  After two disastrous fires in the Vieux Carré, Don Beltram (Bertrand) Gravier decided to subdivide his plantation upriver of Canal Street and sell it for residential lots. Gravier named the suburb Faubourg Sainte Marie, after his wife’s patron saint, and it was the first suburb in New Orleans (today’s Central Business District). Since Americans populated this suburb, it also became known as the American Sector.

  The Americans had come to New Orleans for one reason: to make money. They were enterprising and determined to succeed. They circumvented morality and avoided the penalties of the law, focusing their energies on becoming rich. The Creoles, who enjoyed the leisure of aristocracy and were lethargic both by heredity and environment, scorned their American competitors on the “uptown” side of Canal Street.

  Faubourg Marigny

  On the downriver, or downtown, side of the Vieux Carré, the plantation of the millionaire playboy, Bernard de Marigny, was subdivided in the early nineteenth century and began developing into a suburb in the 1820s and 1830s.

  Bernard de Marigny was the son of Pierre Philippe de Marigny, who had accumulated a fortune in the service of Spain and was the grandson of Antoine Philippe de Marigny. He is called in his obituary the “last of the Creole Aristocracy, one who knows how to dispose of a great fortune with contemptuous indifference.” In 1803, when he was fifteen years old, he inherited $7 million but squandered much of it away gambling, entertaining, and enjoying life. He was a raconteur and an incessant gambler, who brought the game of hazards to the city, naming it le crapaud, meaning toad or frog, because of the position the players assumed while playing it.

  He subdivided his beautiful Faubourg Marigny and even named one of the streets “Craps” because of his passion for the game. Later, however, the street name was changed to Burgundy to relieve a source of embarrassment in the delivery of mail to the four churches on the street. Bernard de Marigny died at the age of eighty-three in a two-room apartment with only one servant.

  French Creole Plantation Culture

  The stories of two other colorful Americans of French descent are classic examples of the extravagant, wealthy characters that were part of the Creole plantation culture.

  Gabriel Valcour Aime lived from 1798 to 1867. In the 1830s, he rebuilt a plantation in St. James Parish that was left to h
im by his father and dated back to the 1790s. Aime was a scientist, planter, philosopher, and financier with an income of well more than one $100,000 annually. He could serve a ten-course meal with everything ranging from fish to coffee, wine, and cigars, all from his own plantation. He led the way in scientific experimentation with sugarcane culture. He also operated a private steamboat from New Orleans for the use of his guests. He became a recluse after his son’s death from yellow fever, and he died of pneumonia in 1867.

  His estate, which was of Louisiana classic design, was set in the heart of a nine thousand-acre plantation. Facing it from a distance, one could see a series of lagoons with stone bridges, gardens where peacocks preened and a wooded area with rabbits, deer, and kangaroos. The first floor of his home was set out in a diamond design of black and white marble. The second floor was made of stone. There were three great stairways of marble and secret stairways inside the walls. His mansion was called Petit Versailles, an appropriate title for the property of a gentleman referred to as the Louis XIV of New Orleans. The home burned down in the 1920s.

  Charles J. Durand was a Creole whose displays of opulence, as well as his life itself, border on the fictitious. And yet, they are so often related and so akin to the outlandish deeds of Marigny and Aime as to make us willing to suspend our disbelief.