The Creoles of Louisiana Collections – Page 2 of 2

Spanish New Orleans

In that city you may go and stand to-day on the spot still as antique and quaint as the Creole mind and heart which cherish it, where gathered in 1765 the motley throng of townsmen and planters whose bold repudiation of their barter to the King of Spain we have just reviewed; where in 1768 Lafrénière harangued them, and they, few in number and straitened in purse but not in daring, rallied in arms against Spain’s indolent show of authority and drove it into the Gulf. They were the first people in America to make open war distinctly for the … Read more

Spanish Conciliation

Crozat-Law-Louis XV. Charles III. Who ever at one time or another was the transatlantic master of Louisiana managed its affairs on the same bad principle: To none of them had a colony any inherent rights. They entered into possession as cattle are let into a pasture or break into a field. It was simply a commercial venture projected in the interests of the sovereign’s or monopolist’s revenues, and restrictions were laid or indulgences bestowed upon it merely as those interests seemed to require. And so the Mississippi Delta, until better ideas could prevail, could not show other than a gaunt, … Read more

Spain Against Fate

Tile port of New Orleans was neither closed nor open. Spain was again in fear of Great Britain. The United States minister at Madrid was diligently pointing to the possibility of a British invasion of Louisiana from Canada, by way of the Mississippi; to the feebleness of the Spanish foothold; to the unfulfilled terms of the treaty of 1783; to the restlessness of the Kentuckians; to everything, indeed, that could have effect in the effort to extort the cession of “Orleans” and the Floridas. But Spain held fast, and Miró, to the end of his governorship, plotted with Wilkinson and … Read more

Praying to the King

A single paragraph in recapitulation. In 1699, France, by the hand of her gallant sailor, D’Iberville, founded the province of Louisiana. In 1718, his brother, Bienville, laid out the little parallelogram of streets and ditches, and palisaded lots which formed New Orleans. Here, amid the willow-jungles of the Mississippi’s low banks, under the glaring sunshine of bayou clearings, in the dark shadows of the Delta’s wet forests, the Louisiana Creoles came into existence valorous, unlettered, and unrestrained, as military outpost life in such a land might make them. In sentiment they were loyal to their king; in principle, to themselves … Read more

New Orleans Sought – Louisiana Bought

“France has cut the knot,” wrote Minister Livingston to Secretary Madison. It is the word of Bonaparte himself, that his first diplomatic act with. Spain had for its object the recovery of Louisiana. His power enabled him easily to outstrip American negotiations, and on the 1st of October, 1800, the Spanish King entered privately into certain agreements by which, on the 21st of March, 1801, Louisiana, vast, but to Spain unremunerative and indefensible, passed secretly into the hands of the First Consul in exchange for the petty Italian “kingdom of Etruria.” When Minister Livingston wrote, in November, 1802, the secret … Read more

New Orleans in 1803

New Orleans had been under the actual sway of the Spaniard for thirty-four years. Ten thousand inhabitants were gathered in and about its walls. Most of the whites were Creoles. Even in the province at large these were three in every four. Immigrants from Malaga, the Canaries, and Nova Scotia had passed on through the town and into the rural districts. Of the thousands of Americans, only a few scores of mercantile pioneers came as far as the town – sometimes with families, but generally without. Free trade with France had brought some French merchants, and the Reign of Terror, as we … Read more

Later Days

Not schools only, but churches, multiplied rapidly. There was a great improvement in public order. Affrays were still common; the Know-Nothing movement came on, and a few “thugs” terrorized the city with campaign broils, beating, stabbing, and shooting. Base political leaders and spoilsmen utilized these disorders, and they reached an unexpected climax and end one morning confronted by a vigilance committee, which had, under cover of night, seized the town arsenal behind the old Cabildo and barricaded the approaches to the Place d’Armes with uptorn paving-stones. But riots were no longer a feature of the city. It was no longer … Read more

Inundations

The people of New Orleans take pride in Canal Street. It is to the modern town what the Place d’Armes was to the old. Here stretch out in long parade, in variety of height and color, the great retail stores, displaying their silken and fine linen and golden seductions; and the fair Creole and American girls, and the self-depreciating American mothers, and the majestic Creole matrons, all black lace and alabaster, swarm and hum and push in and out and flit here and there among the rich things, and fine things, the novelties and the bargains. Its eighteen-feet sidewalks are … Read more

How Boré Made Sugar

The planters of the Delta, on their transfer to Spanish domination, saw indigo, the chief product of their lands, shut out of market. French protection was lost and French ports were closed to them. Those of Spain received them only into ruinous competition with the better article made in the older and more southern Spanish colonies. By and by kinder commercial regulations offered a certain relief; but then new drawbacks began to beset them. Season after season was unfavorable, and at length an insect appeared which, by the years 1793-94, was making such ravages that the planters were in despair. … Read more

History of the Creoles in Louisiana

The first white settlers of Louisiana were French, usually the second born sons of aristocrats who left France to seek adventure in the New World. They brought their traditional style of cooking from the continent, and being rich aristocrats, they also brought along their chefs as well! These Frenchmen came to be called Creoles, and made up the upper crust of New Orleans. Their descendents can still be found in the French Quarter today. This manuscript takes a look at the history of this unique group of people. One city in the United States is, without pretension or Mention, picturesque … Read more

From Subjects To Citizens

Little wonder that it is said the Creoles wept as they stood on the Place d’Armes and saw the standard of a people, whose national existence was a mere twenty-years’ experiment, taking the place of that tricolor on which perched the glory of a regenerated France. On that very spot some of them had taken part in the armed repudiation of the first cession. The two attitudes and the two events differed alike. The earlier transfer had come loaded with drawbacks and tyrannous exactions; the latter came freighted with long-coveted benefits and with some of the dearest rights of man. … Read more

French Founders

Let us give a final glance at the map. It is the general belief that a line of elevated land, now some eighty or ninety miles due north of the Louisiana coast, is the prehistoric shore of the Gulf. A range of high, abrupt hills or bluffs, which the Mississippi first encounters at the city of Vicksburg, and whose southwestward and then southward trend it follows thereafter to the town of Baton Rouge, swerves, just below this point, rapidly to a due east course, and declines gradually until, some thirty miles short of the eastern boundary of Louisiana, it sinks … Read more

Flush Times

The brow and cheek of this man were darkened by outdoor exposure, but they were not weather-beaten. His shapely, bronzed hand was no harder or rougher than was due to the use of the bridle-rein and the gunstock. His eye was the eye of a steed; his neck-the same. His hair was a little luxuriant. His speech was positive, his manner was military, his sentiments were antique, his clothing was of broadcloth, his boots were neat, and his hat was soft, broad, and slouched a little to show its fineness. Such in his best aspect was the Mississippi River planter. … Read more

Fauborg Ste. Marie

If one will stand to-day on the broad levee at New Orleans, with his back to the Mississippi, a short way out to the left and riverward from the spot where the longvanished little fort St. Louis once made pretence of guarding the town’s upper river corner, he will look down two streets at once. They are Canal and Common, which gently diverge from their starting-point at his feet and narrow away before his eye as they run down toward the low, unsettled lots and commons behind the city. Canal Street, the centre and pride of New Orleans, takes its … Read more

Count O’Reilly and Spanish Law

“Cruel O’Reilly,” (From a miniature in possession of Hon, Charles Gayarre, of Louisiana.) One morning toward the end of July 1769, the people of New Orleans were brought suddenly to their feet by the news that the Spaniards were at the mouth of the river in overwhelming force. There was no longer any room to postpone choice of action. Marquis, the Swiss captain, with a white cockade in his hat (he had been the leading advocate for a republic), and Petit, with a pistol in either hand, came out upon the ragged, sunburnt grass of the Place d’Armes and called … Read more

Burr’s Conspiracy

On one of those summer evenings when the Creoles, in the early years of the century, were wont to seek the river air in domestic and social groups under the willow and china trees of their levee, there glided around the last bend of the Mississippi above New Orleans “an elegant barge,” equipped with sails and colors, and impelled by the stroke of ten picked oarsmen. It came down the harbor, drew in to the bank, and presently set ashore a small, slender, extremely handsome man, its only passenger. He bore letters from General Wilkinson, introducing him in New Orleans, … Read more

Brighter Skies

“Out of this nettle, danger,” says the great bard, “we pluck this flower, safety.” The dreadful scourge of 1853 roused the people of New Orleans, for the first time, to the necessity of knowing the proven truth concerning themselves and the city in which they dwelt. In the midst of the epidemic, the city council had adjourned, and a number of its members had fled. But, in response to popular demand, a board of health had appointed the foremost advocates of quarantine and municipal cleansing a commission to study and report the melancholy lessons of the plague. It labored arduously … Read more

Barataria Destroyed

Weighing all the facts, it is small wonder that the Delta Creoles coquetted with the Baratarians. To say no more of Spanish American or French West Indian tincture, there was the Embargo. There were the warships of Europe skimming ever to and fro in the entrances and exits of the Gulf. Rarely in days of French or Spanish rule had this purely agricultural country and non-manufacturing town been so removed to the world’s end as just at this time. The Mississippi, northward, was free; but its perils had hardly lessened since the days of Spanish rule. Then it was said, … Read more

African Slaves and Indian Wars

The problem of civilization in Louisiana was early complicated by the presence and mutual contact of three races of men. The Mississippi Company’s agricultural colonial scheme was based on the West Indian idea of African slave labor. Already the total number of blacks had risen to equal that of the whites, and within the Delta, outside of New Orleans, they must have largely preponderated. In 1727 this idea began to be put into effect just without the town’s upper boundary, where the Jesuit fathers accommodated themselves to it in model form, and between 1726 and 1745 gradually acquired and put … Read more

A Hundred Thousand People

What a change! The same Governor Villeré could not but say, “The Louisianian who retraces the condition of his country under the government of kings can never cease to bless the day when the great American confederation received him into its bosom.” It was easy for Louisianians to be Americans; but to let Americans be Louisianians!-there was the rub. Yet it had to be. In ten years, the simple export and import trade of the port had increased fourfold; and in the face of inundations and pestilences, discord of sentiment and tongues, and the saddest of public morals and disorder, … Read more