Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/432

404 NEW ORLEANS Acadia, as thirty -six years before on the same spot they had received the women and children of Fort Rosalie (Natchez), recaptured from the hands of the savages who had massacred their husbands and fathers. Here in 1768, the town being then a place of about 3200 souls, the people within the walls and from the farms and plantations of the surrounding delta mustered under arms almost to a man, repudiated the cession of Louisiana to Spain, and compelled the holder of the Spanish king s commission to leave their town and return to Havana. Here again, in the following year, Don Alexandra O Reilly landed from a fleet of twenty-four vessels with 2600 Spanish troops and fifty pieces of artillery, and restored the Spanish power by mere terror of such an overwhelming force. Here stood under Spanish sentence and fell under a volley of Spanish musketry the leaders in this the first attempt made in America to overthrow by force of arms the dominion of a European sovereign. It was here, again, that in 1779 the brilliant young Spanish governor Galvez, laying before the people the proposal to head them in defence of their homes, and intending to lead them against the neighbouring British posts along the shores of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico east of it, was answered by their acclamations, and was followed to repeated and uninterrupted victory. Here, when in 1788 and 1794 the heart of the frail wooden town was plucked out by fire, the houseless sufferers covered the rank sward with booths and tents until that Spanish-American architecture could rise out of the ashes whose brick and stucco and coloured limewashes, and flowery inner courts seen through covered carriage-ways, and overhanging balconies, and confusion of heights and breadths and shapes, with here and there a palm tree lifting its stately top among them, heavy with yellow dates, still offer to the eye a moss-grown and crumbling picture whose variety and poetry tempts description to repeat itself. On the 30th of November 1803, in the council hall of the old cabildo that still overlooks the square, the aged governor Salcedo handed the keys of the city back to the representatives of the French Government, the marquis of Casa Calvo declared the people of Louisiana absolved from their allegiance to the Spanish king, and on the flagstaff in the open plaza the yellow flag of Spain came down and the tricolor of France arose in its place. And here, at length, only twenty days afterward, with similar ceremonies, the keys of the city passed from the hands of the French colonial prefect to those of the commissioners for the United States, and through their tears the Creoles saw the ensign of the French republic sink and the American flag unfurl over what is to-day, as it was then, the least American of all the cities within the bounds of the American States. A bronze equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson stands in the middle of the ground on the spot where, in January 1815, when he had driven back to its ships from the plains just below the city the bleeding remnant of a formidable British invasion, he passed, amid all the evidences of joy that a delivered city could display cheers and salvos and rolling drums, arms and banners and maidens garlands under an arch of triumph and into the cathedral, and so onward in later years to the highest seat in the nation. At the time (1803) when New Orleans with its 10,000 inhabi tants, mostly French Creoles and their slaves, passed into the political bond of the United States, the prospect of its future com mercial greatness was not only appreciated but was exaggerated even by the most sagacious minds; for they regarded it in the light of its remarkable geographical position, and of those stirrings of revolution which were beginning to promise the birth of other republics round about the broad circuit of the Mexican Gulf, with maritime powers and commercial energies that must give the position of New Orleans an inestimable value. But, as the future gradually unfolded, on the one hand the provinces that did throw off the Spanish yoke failed persistently to establish internal peace and stability or obtain the confidence of the commercial world, and on the other hand the invention of railway transit revolutionized commerce itself and turned its courses across the natural highways and barriers of the continent; and when, moreover, the pestilence of yellow fever, the plague of the Gulf, made New Orleans one of its most famous ambuscades, and the provincialism and lethargy of an isolated and indolent civilization allowed this last unfortu nate condition to remain uncorrected, the limitations to the city s commercial grandeur were distinctly drawn around it, and a port that had promised to become one of the greatest in the world became, even while it was expanding to metropolitan dimensions, a monument of golden possibilities dwarfed by unforeseen and over powering disadvantages. New Orleans held its highest place on the comparative scale of cities in the United States when, by the census of 1840, only New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were greater in population. In the decade that followed, these cities left it far behind and others overtook it and passed it by. In the second decade after the junction of the great west and the Atlantic seaboard by canals and railways many other conditions came in to the great disadvantage of New Orleans. The development of the carrying trade on the lakes of the far north, the adoption by the world s maritime trade of ships and steamers drawing too much water to pass the bars at the mouth of the Mississippi, and in the city the riot made by death, which in three years (1853-55) from a population diminished by flight to barely 145,000 carried off over 35,000 persons, these things and others combined to impede the town s progress at a period when the growth of American cities was a marvel of the times, and to reduce her comparative importance in population, wealth, enlightenment, and architectural dignity. However, turning from these comparisons and contrasting the city only with itself, we see the trading post described by the priest-chronicler Charlevoix 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, changed in 1860 to a metropolis whose exports, imports, and domestic receipts aggre gated $324,000,000. In that year the election of a president from the Republican party was made the occasion of acts that led to war between the Northern and Southern States of the Union. The commerce of New Orleans experienced an early paralysis: the port was soon blockaded by the United States navy ; the city fell into the hands of the Federal forces; and its aggrandizement suffered a recoil from which it has taken nearly a quarter of a century to recover. Only in the present year (1883) will its total commerce again distinctly reach the magnitude it enjoyed in 1860. Its wealth in 1882 was $112,000,000. In the present year it is closely esti mated that 2,000,000 bales of cotton will be received across its levee for shipment to the world s markets. It appears highly prob able that those drawbacks which have been enumerated have at length expended their power, and that New Orleans now looks out upon a future of more genuine promise than ever before. A system of jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi, built by the distinguished engineer Eads in 1879, has opened the city s deep and spacious harbour to the largest ocean craft. Lines of steamers to the great ports of Europe are replacing with their great carrying capacity the light tonnage of other days. An active sanitary system, which grows every year better, gives reasonable promise of immunity from the deadly epidemics of former years ; street paving has recom menced; the inadequate and superficial drainage is being improved, under the direction of a sanitary association auxiliary to the board of health, a diligent house-to-house inspection is being performed, and the open gutters that are in all the streets are daily flushed during the warm months with water thrown into them by powerful pumps at the river front. The annual mortality-rate of the three years 1879 to 1881 averaged 26 52 per 1000. The old spirit of depend ence upon natural advantages which once deluded the people of the city is yielding to a more energetic acceptance of the principles of modern commerce, and railway connexions, near and remote, are increasing year by year. The immense increase of population and products in that wide south-west that stretches out beyond to the Mexican border offers new accessions of commercial tribute. Mexico holds out fair assurance of a new era of political order and material development ; and within the city s immediate bounds both the convictions of her citizens and the movement of capital are recognizing theoretically and practically the necessity and advan tage of manufactures. About ten million dollars are at present invested in this direction, and the aggregate is steadily growing. Within the last two years (1882-83) a new impulse towards archi tectural improvement has shown itself, and several edifices of com paratively imposing character have been erected. Chief among them is the new Cotton Exchange. The small public squares here and there in the city have been laid out in lawns and adorned with fountains ; but, as long as the great body of the people is not sub jected to the discoinforts of pent-up living, the larger reservations of ground intended for public parks are likely to remain as they are, unimproved. Suburban pleasure resorts are few, the principal being two waterside gardens of moderate pretension on the neigh bouring margin of Lake Ponchartrain. The Creoles of New Orleans and the surrounding delta are a hand some, graceful, intelligent race, of a decidedly Gallic type, though softened in features, speech, and carriage, and somewhat relaxed in physical and mental energies by the enervating influences that blow from the West Indies and the Spanish Main. Their better class does not offer to the eye that unpleasing evidence of gross admixture of race which distinguishes those Latin-American communities around the borders of the adjacent seas; and the name they have borrowed from those regions does not necessarily imply, any more than it excludes, a departure from a pure double line of Latin descent. They are brave, proud, courteous, slow to offend, quick to resent, gay, fond of pomp, and display an ardent relish for pageantries of such childish sort as offers a strong hint of their Spanish-American relationship. They are very musical, yet not, as a class, highly trained in music, have some love of the fine arts, but are little acquainted with or interested in its modern developments, and are comparatively unproductive of art work. The famous carnival dis plays of New Orleans are participated in largely by the "Amcricain," i.e., the Anglo-American ; but they mark one of the victories of Spanish-American over North-American tastes, and probably owe mainly tp the Amcricain " their pretentious dignity and to the Creole their more legitimate harlequin frivolity. Out of the simple