Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans (13 page)

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.

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 him 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.

Arriving in St. Martinville from France in 1820, already an enormously wealthy man, Durand became the owner of thousands of acres of plantation land, which was to be even more valuable later on when it was planted with sugarcane. He built a magnificent home on the Bayou Teche and an
allée
of pine and oak trees that extended from the bayou to his mansion, which he called Pine Alley.

After the death of his first wife, who had borne him twelve children, he became inconsolable. He visited her grave each day, swore never to marry again, and even had an iron statue of himself, kneeling, placed before her tomb. Within a year, however, Durand had remarried and, by his second wife, he fathered another dozen children.

In 1850, as the story goes, when two of his daughters were to be married on the same day, he had imported from China many huge spiders, which he set loose along the
allée
of trees a few days before the wedding so that they had enough time to spin cloud-like webs across the canopy of the natural arcade, which Durand then sprinkled with gold and silver dust by a number of young slaves with bellows. The two thousand guests arrived, their gilt-decorated carriages rolling on Persian rugs spread beneath the cathedral nave of sparkling webs that floated above them in the breeze.

During the Civil War, Pine Alley was devastated. The slaves ran away, and the Union army stripped the mansion and ruined the crops. The family scattered, and the house began to deteriorate. Some years ago, it was completely demolished. Of the three-mile alley, only a mile remains, leading back from Louisiana Highway 86. Still beneath a cathedral nave, the effect enhanced by the narrowness of the alley and the height of the trees, the road leads to nothing.

Lafayette’s Visit

In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette
visited New Orleans, an event that would long be remembered in the city. The legislature appropriated $15,000 to furnish an apartment in the Cabildo
for the use of the Revolutionary War hero. He arrived on the steamboat
Natchez
from Mobile
. The militia passed in review before him and he was f
ê
ted in Caldwell’s American Theater and the Théâtre d’Orléans
.

Creoles Versus Americans

Between 1825 and 1830, the number of merchants doing business in the city grew from 60 to 272. The number of taverns increased more than seventy percent, a good sign of the prosperity and ebullient spirits of the times. The most impressive gains were made in the Faubourg St. Mary
.

Within a few years after the Americans began to settle in the area, the value of property equaled that of the Vieux Carré
. The Vieux Carré was the retailing center of the city, but importers, exporters, and brokers proliferated in the American Sector.

Competition between Creoles
and Americans manifested itself in many ways. The Creoles objected to the use of English as the official language in the city and to the courts showing favoritism to the Americans in their decisions. The Americans, on the other hand, complained that all civic improvements were being made in the Vieux Carré
and none in the suburbs.