Atlantic New Orleans: 18th and 19th Centuries

Founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the city of La Nouvelle-Orléans was named in honor of the French Regent Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. In 1722, it became the capital of the then-French colony of Louisiana. After four decades of French rule, it was ceded to Spain, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, in 1762. Almost four decades later, in 1800, it was briefly (and secretly) retroceded to France before the latter, faced with defeat in neighboring Saint-Domingue, sold it to the United States in 1803, turning La Nouvelle-Orléans into New Orleans. Throughout the eighty-five years of its colonial history, it remained a small frontier town, with a population of about 8,000 in 1805. Its integration to the United States marked the beginning of its expansion, favored by its ideal position at the mouth of the Mississippi River, at the confluence of the main riverway of the young American republic and the Gulf of Mexico, a position which permitted exchanges of products and people between the United States, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic. Receiving large contingents of migrants (free and forced) from the eastern part of the United States, the Caribbean (especially the “refugees” from the Haitian Revolution), Europe (France, in particular, throughout the first half of the 19th century), and Africa (until the closing of the Atlantic slave trade), it grew to 102,193 inhabitants by 1840, then becoming the third-largest city in the United States. Its specific colonial past and singular evolution in the early American period account for its complex status in the 19th-century United States. Because it relied on the institution of slavery, it was a city of the South in the forty-year sectional confrontation that eventually tore the country apart in 1860. The presence of a significant population of free people of color, often educated, politically conscious, and socially and economically active, however, made it depart from the usual Southern pattern. Moreover, its existence as one of the main port cities of the United States, its cosmopolitanism, and its multilingualism made it follow a development pattern closer to that of the Atlantic port cities of the northeastern United States. After the Civil War, it became the spearhead of the civil rights movement, under the lead of the politically conscious, culturally, socially, and sometimes economically influential population of color that had been free before the Civil War. When the 19th century closed, New Orleans became an American city of the segregated South and its Atlantic destiny ended.

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