Founded in 1718 by France, New Orleans was the first major town established in the Louisiana colony. The government-sponsored Company of the West undertook the rapid peopling of the city, named after the duke of Orleans, 100 miles up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico. While the French settled the area principally to protect their interests on the lower Mississippi, settlement was also linked to a massive reform of France’s financial system. When that project failed, the huge scale of its vision mocked the weak result in New Orleans. Except for the Acadians who arrived in 1755, few immigrants were attracted to the settlement subsequently. As a result, New Orleans Parish contained only about 4,200 inhabitants in 1766, consisting mostly of white settlers and African slaves.
The choice to locate the parish at many bends in the river was precise: It was the site of an ancient Indian portage between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, a portage that served as the nexus of trade in the lower Mississippi Valley before the French arrived. This trail commanded the traffic of the river at easily policed narrows and served as the only “backdoor” route into the delta region and to the Gulf of Mexico. Although disease and outmigration had decimated local Native Americans, the area still functioned as the commercial nodal point of the North American interior between the Appalachian-Allegheny and Rocky Mountain chains as Europeans filled the regions inhabited by Native Americans. Furthermore, settlers developed the natural levees at this particular bend in the river that contained rich alluvial deposits and formed an embankment that protected fields from river flooding.
By 1763 these factors produced a vibrant economic life in New Orleans because virtually all of Louisiana’s commerce was brokered there. Its town center was still a small urban space, although studded with a few substantial public and church buildings. Plantations adjoined the geometrically plotted streets of the town center on both sides and formed a continuous strip for miles on the Mississippi’s left bank and along a small portion of the opposing right bank.
New Orleans was fundamentally a slave society: Its social organization was based on exports, particularly indigo and wood products, produced by African labor. Unlike the British plantation colonies in Virginia and the Carolinas, however, New Orleans—and Louisiana generally—never developed an overwhelming staple crop. Despite the French efforts to build a plantation system, the plantation economy collapsed in the late 1720s due to competition from the English colonies in Virginia and as a consequence of the Natchez Revolt of 1729. The resulting exchange economy left many slaves to provide for themselves; they used this opportunity to negotiate greater control over their lives. As a result, New Orleans eventually developed a class of free black people, although their autonomy was never fully realized.
Although the town experienced a series of colonial ownership transfers between the French, Spanish and Americans from the mid-18th century to the early 19th century, the town was destined to become much more populous and one of the most legendary of all southern communities.
Further reading: Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mamon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).
—Thomas N. Ingersoll and E. Jerry Jessee
World History
