cities of the United States.[1] This high death-rate is often attributed
in great part to the large negro population, among whom the
mortality in 1900 was 42·1 per 1000; but the negro population
largely comprises that labouring element whose faulty provision for
health and sickness in every large city swells the death-rate. A
light yellow-fever epidemic occurred in 1897–1898–1899, after nineteen
years of immunity, and a more serious one in 1905, when the
United States Marine Hospital Service for a time took control of
the city’s sanitation and attempted to exterminate the Stegomyia
mosquito. The city Board of Health has done much to secure pure
food for the people, and has exercised efficient oversight of communicable
diseases, including yellow fever. In movements for the
betterment of the city—in commerce, sanitation, public works and
general enterprise—a leading part has been taken by an organization
of citizens known as the New Orleans Progressive Union, whose
charter and by-laws prohibit its participation in political and religious
issues.
History.—New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Lemoyne, Sieur de Bienville, and was named in honour of the then Regent of France.[2] The priest-chronicler Charlevoix described it in 1721 as a place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators; he seems to have been the first, however, to predict for it an imperial future. In 1722 New Orleans was made the capital of the vast province of Louisiana (q.v.). Much of the population in early days was of the wildest and, in part, of the most undesirable character—deported galley-slaves, trappers, gold-hunters and city scourings; and the governors’ letters are full of complaints regarding the riffraff sent as soldiers as late as Kerlerec’s administration (1753–1763). In 1788 a fire destroyed a large part of the city. In 1795–1796 the sugar industry was first put upon a firm basis. The last twenty years of the 18th century were especially characterized by the growth of commerce on the Mississippi, and the development of those international interests, commercial and political, of which New Orleans was the centre. The year 1803 is memorable for the actual transfer (at New Orleans) of Louisiana to France, and the establishment of American dominion. At this time the city had about 10,000 inhabitants, mostly French creoles and their slaves. The next dozen years were marked by the beginnings of self-government in city and state; by the excitement attending the Aaron Burr conspiracy (in the course of which, in 1806–1807, General James Wilkinson practically put New Orleans under martial law); by the immigration from Cuba of French planters; and by the American War of 1812.
In 1815 New Orleans was attacked by a conjunct expedition of British naval and military forces from Halifax, N.S., and other points. The American government managed to obtain early information of the enterprise and prepared to meet it with forces (regular and militia) under Maj.-Gen. Andrew Jackson. The British advance was made by way of Lake Borgne, and the troops landed at a fisherman’s village on the 23rd of December 1814, Major-General Sir E. Pakenham taking command there on the 25th. An immediate advance on the still insufficiently prepared defences of the Americans might have led to the capture of the city, but this was not attempted, and both sides remained inactive for some time awaiting reinforcements. At last in the early morning of the 8th of January 1815 (after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed) a direct attack was made on the now strongly entrenched line of the defenders at Chalmette near the Mississippi river. It failed disastrously with a loss of 2000 out of 9000 British troops engaged, among the dead being Pakenham and Major-General Gibbs. The expedition was soon afterwards abandoned and the troops embarked for England.
From this time to the outbreak of the American Civil War the city annals are almost wholly commercial. Hopeful activity and great development characterized especially the decade 1830–1840. The introduction of gas (about 1830); the building of the New Orleans and Pontchartrain railway (1820–1830), one of the earliest in the United States; the introduction of the first steam cotton press (1832), and the beginning of the public school system (1840) marked these years; foreign exports more than doubled in the period 1831–1833. Travellers in this decade have left pictures of the animation of the river trade—more congested in those days of river boats and steamers and ocean-sailing craft than to-day; of the institution of slavery, the quadroon balls, the medley of Latin tongues, the disorder and carousals of the river-men and adventurers that filled the city. Altogether there was much of the wildness of a frontier town, and a seemingly boundless promise of prosperity. The crisis of 1837, indeed, was severely felt, but did not greatly retard the city’s advancement, which continued unchecked until the Civil War. In 1849 Baton Rouge replaced New Orleans as the capital of the state. In 1850 telegraphic communication was established with St Louis and New York; in 1851 the New Orleans & Jackson railway, the first railway outlet northward, now part of the Illinois Central, and in 1854 the western outlet, now the Southern Pacific, were begun.
The political and commercial importance of New Orleans, as well as its strategic position, marked it out as the objective of a Union expedition soon after the opening of the Civil War. Captain D. G. Farragut (q.v.) was selected by the Union government for the command of the Western Gulf squadron in January 1862. The four heavy ships of the squadron (none of them armoured) were with many difficulties brought up to the head of the passes, and around them assembled nineteen smaller vessels (mostly gunboats) and a flotilla of twenty mortar-boats under Commander D. D. Porter (q.v.). The main defences of the Mississippi consisted of the two permanent forts Jackson and St Philip. These were of masonry and brick construction, armed with heavy rifled guns as well as smooth-bores, and placed on either bank so as to command long reaches of the river and the surrounding flats. In addition, the Confederates had some improvised ironclads and gunboats, large and small. On the 16th of April, after elaborate reconnaissances, the Union fleet steamed up into position below the forts, and on the 18th the mortar-boats opened fire. Their shells fell with great accuracy, and although one of the boats was sunk and two disabled, fort Jackson was seriously damaged. But the defences were by no means crippled even after a second bombardment on the 19th, and a formidable obstacle to the advance of the Union main fleet was a boom between the forts designed to detain the ships under close fire should they attempt to run past. At that time the eternal duel of ship versus fort seemed to have been settled in favour of the latter, and it was well for the Union government that it had placed its ablest and most resolute officer at the head of the squadron. Gunboats were repeatedly sent up at night to endeavour to destroy the boom, and the bombardment went on, disabling only a few guns but keeping the gunners of fort Jackson under cover. At last the gunboats “Pinola” and “Itasca” ran in and broke a gap in the boom, and at 2 A.M. on the 24th the fleet weighed, Farragut in the corvette “Hartford” leading. After a severe conflict at close quarters, with the forts and with the ironclads and fire rafts of the defence, almost all the Union fleet (except the mortar-boats) forced its way past. At noon on the 25th Farragut anchored in front of New Orleans; forts Jackson and St Philip, isolated and continuously bombarded by the mortar-boats, surrendered on the 28th; and soon afterwards the military portion of the expedition occupied the city. The commander, General B. F. Butler, subjected New Orleans to a rigorous martial law so tactlessly administered as greatly to intensify the hostility of South and North, but his administration was in many respects beneficial to the city, which was kept both orderly and healthy. Towards the end of the war General N.P. Banks held the command at New Orleans.
Throughout the years of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period the history of the city is inseparable from that of the state. All the constitutional conventions were held here, the seat of
- ↑ But the death-rate of New Orleans was not so high as that of some smaller Southern cities, Richmond (29·7), Savannah (34·3) or Charleston (37·5), for example. According to Mortality Statistics, 1905 (Washington, 1907), the death-rate in New Orleans in 1905 was 23·7, and the annual average between 1900 and 1904 was 23·1.
- ↑ Two of the lakes in the vicinity commemorate respectively Louis Phelypeaux, Count Pontchartrain, minister and chancellor of France, and Jean Frederic Phelypeaux, Count Maurepas, minister and secretary of state; a third is really a landlocked inlet of the sea, and its name (Lake Borgne) has reference to its “incomplete” or “defective” character.
