Beautiful Crescent: A History of New Orleans Read online

  On August 18, possession was taken in the Plaza. O’Reilly walked to the center of the square and presented Aubry with the letter from the king. Aubry placed the keys of the city at O’Reilly’s feet. Spanish flags were run up in all parts of the city, and artillery was fired. Then all retired to the cathedral to say a Te Deum in thanksgiving.

  Following the ceremony, O’Reilly consulted privately with Aubry, demanding that he prepare a complete account of the events surrounding the rebellion. The French governor, obeying the orders of his new sovereign, wrote a complete report. As a result of his information, O’Reilly arrested Lafrenière, Foucault, Noyan, de Boisblanc, members of the Superior Council, and Braud, the printer. Each of these men was summoned separately to his home. Later, Marquis, an officer of the troops; Doucet, a lawyer; Petit and Mazant, planters; Jean and Joseph Milhet; and Caresse and Poupet, merchants; were also arrested.

  According to historian Charles Gayarré, Joseph Villere, who had led the Germans to join the rebels, was on his plantation on the German Coast when he received a letter from Aubry saying that he had nothing to fear from O’Reilly and that he could come to New Orleans in perfect safety. Villere descended the river to New Orleans and found himself arrested. Outraged, he struck the Spanish officers, who pierced him with bayonets. He lingered and later died in prison, awaiting trial (Gayarré 1851, 304).

  “The trial of those indicted as leaders of the rebellion began in late August 1769 and did not terminate until October 24. It was conducted according to the standard Spanish judicial procedures. The Spanish Court set out to prove that there had been a conspiracy to oust Ulloa, and that treason and sedition had been committed. The defendants and other witnesses were interrogated separately, as there was no trial by jury in Spanish Law, nor trial held in public court” (Texada 1970). Their sentences were pronounced by O’Reilly on October 24, 1769, and on the following day, October 25, five rebels—Lafrenière, Noyan, Caresse, Marquis, and Joseph Milhet—were shot to death by Spanish soldiers, there being no hangman in the colony. Petit was imprisoned for life; Mazant and Doucet were sentenced to imprisonment for ten years; and de Boisblanc, Jean Milhet, and Poupet to imprisonment for six years, all in the Castle Morror in Havana. Braud, the printer of the petition, was discharged. Shocked into submission, the rest of colonists gave up the fight. The French Creoles never forgave O’Reilly for his act. Henceforth, he was to be known as “Bloody O’Reilly,” and as such he has taken his place in the history of Louisiana.

  The question of whether O’Reilly was cruel or justified in his treatment of the rebels continues to be a matter of dispute among historians. François Barbé-Marbois said that “King Charles secretly disapproved of these acts of outrage.” Historian Judge François-Xavier Martin said that “posterity . . . will doom this act to public execration. No necessity demanded, no policy justified it.”

  On the other hand, if it was treason, it was at the time considered a most grievous crime by all nations and punishable by death.

  Historian Henry Edward Chambers puts the blame for the execution of the rebels on the shoulders of Governor Aubry. O’Reilly, he says, came to the colony with orders from the king to suppress rebellion and punish leaders. “[He] . . . was compelled . . . to make an example of the leaders . . . lest other Spanish colonials follow the Louisiana example.” Aubry, he feels, kept Ulloa and the colonial leaders from coming to terms. “He inserted a wedge of mutual antagonism,” which thus caused rebellion.

  O’Reilly began his administration by abolishing the Superior Council and substituting a Cabildo, composed of six regidors (councilmen) and alcaldes (mayors), an attorney-general, and a clerk, all presided over by the governor. The laws of Spain, the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts), were substituted for those of France.

  Under the Cabildo Governing Council of Louisiana, O’Reilly abolished Indian slavery. He permitted many French officials to stay in office and helped farmers by establishing land titles. Under O’Reilly’s Ordinance of 1770, a system of homesteading land was established, allowing an owner a parcel of land six to eight arpents fronting on a river or bayou and forty arpents in depth if he occupied the land and enclosed it within three years. The front of the land was to be cleared.

  During his governance, roads and levees were installed. The only religion tolerated was the Catholic religion, which worked no hardship on the Creole Catholic population. Medicine was divided into three disciplines during his term: medicine proper, surgery, and pharmacy. An Ursuline nun was the first pharmacist in Louisiana.

  Don Luis de Unzaga

  As we can see, O’Reilly’s administration was not without merit. He left Louisiana in 1770, turning over the reins of government to Don Luis de Unzaga y Amezaga, a successful, well-liked man whose rule was mild and paternal, as was that of every other governor during the next three decades of Spanish domination. Unzaga married a Creole native of Louisiana. As governor, he did whatever was needed to make the colony successful. Expediency was the byword of the Spanish domination. Unzaga winked at smuggling and allowed the British traders to have commerce with the Spanish settlers along the Mississippi, because the colony needed what they supplied.

  One of the most well remembered Spanish immigrants to come to New Orleans during this period was Don Andrès Almonester y Roxas, who came from Andalusia, Spain, in 1769, at the age of forty-four. A widower whose wife and child died in Spain, he had been appointed Royal Notary for the king of Spain. At his first meeting with the Cabildo Council, he was also appointed clerk and notary to Governor Unzaga and his Intendant and Royal Notary for Louisiana. Almonester was later to prove himself a real estate genius, New Orleans’s greatest benefactor, and was to become the father of the celebrated Baroness Pontalba.

  A list of the value of herbs by Sister Xavier, first female pharmacist.

  Don Bernardo de Galvez

  In 1777, Don Bernardo de Galvez took over the duties as governor. Galvez was only thirty-one years old, a member of an influential family, and another Spanish governor to marry a Creole girl from Louisiana, Felicie de St. Maxent d’Estrehan. He provided himself to be extraordinarily heroic and admirable. He allowed great freedom to the colonists in their commerce and gave help openly to the American Revolutionists. Spain declared war on England May 8, 1779, and on July 8, Charles III authorized his Louisiana subjects to take part in the war.

  With a small fleet and an army of 1,430 men, Galvez led successful attacks against the British outposts at Baton Rouge and Natchez, capturing Fort Manchac along the way. In 1780, he conquered Mobile and then undertook a lengthy attack against Pensacola. The English commander capitulated May 9, 1781, an act by which the province of West Florida was acquired by Spain. By eliminating the British presence from these forts, Galvez’s Louisiana Regiment and militias effectively ended the attacks launched against American troops from the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. As a consequence, the descendants of Galvez’s troops are entitled to become members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution organizations.

  The Treaty of Peace was signed in Paris, January, 1783, acknowledging the independence of the United States, with a southern boundary line of thirty-one degrees latitude. The description was important, since it became the dividing line between the United States and the Spanish colonies. Both Floridas thus passed to Spanish control.

  In 1785, Galvez was made captain-general of Cuba, Louisiana, and the two Floridas. The same year, he succeeded his father as viceroy of Mexico. Galvez died in Mexico on November 30, 1786, at the age of thirty-eight. He remains one of the most romantic figures in colonial Louisiana history. A statue of Galvez stands at the foot of Canal Street, and St. Bernard Parish is named in honor of St. Bernard, Galvez’s patron saint.

  Don Esteban Rodríguez Miró y Sabater succeeded Galvez in 1785. He, too, married a native Creole girl, Marie Celeste Elenore de McCarty. It was during Miró’s time that five thousand French Acadian exiles began arriving in Louisiana. During the French and Indian
War, they had refused to swear allegiance to England and had therefore been exiled. They were shipped to different points along the Atlantic coast and to the far-flung ports of England and France. At one port in France, 375 families arrived (comprised of 1,574 people).

  Since the Spanish needed farmers to provide food for the colonists in Louisiana, bowing once again to expediency, they transported the Acadians on Spanish ships from the ports of France to make their homes in Louisiana. The Acadians settled in the Lafourche-Teche area, where they would become substantial farmers and permanent inhabitants of the region. The Spanish gave the newcomers land grants, livestock, and grain to begin their new lives in southwest Louisiana. To Louisiana, they brought warmth and gaiety, love of home and family, and a love of the land. Like the Germans, they provided food for the tables of the colonists. But unlike the immigrants who eventually amalgamated, they kept to themselves in the bayou country, working their land and establishing their homes. They spoke almost exclusively to one another, using the seventeenth century French of their forefathers. Few of them spoke anything but French until the First World War.

  The Disastrous Fires

  In 1788, during Miró’s administration, the first of two terrible fires in New Orleans occurred. On Good Friday, March 21, 1788, Don Vincente Jose Nunez, the military treasurer, was in his private chapel in his residence on Chartres Street near St. Louis. It was a very windy day, and a candle fell from the altar, setting the chapel on fire. Flames spread and engulfed the entire city. Residences and business places burned to the ground. The fire spread around the Plaza and ignited the town hall, the arsenal, the parish church, and the quarters of the Capuchins, all of which disappeared into smoke. Prisoners were released from jail just in time to escape the flames. In the morning, tents covered the plaza and the levee, and only chimneys remained of the 856 buildings that had been lost. Nearly half the town was in ashes.

  Six years later, in 1794, some children playing on Royal Street accidentally set fire to a hay store. Within three hours, 212 stores and houses had burned down. The new buildings that had been built at the bottom of the Plaza escaped, but only two stores were left standing, and once again, the levee and the Plaza became camping grounds for the city’s inhabitants.

  From this time on, buildings were erected with sturdier material. Tile roofs came into general use. Homes now displayed Spanish-American features, and the beauty of the town, as well as its safety, was improved. The new buildings stood shoulder-to-shoulder with party walls, each a different color of stucco over brick. The overall effect was Caribbean, from which area much of the architecture was borrowed.

  An ordinance had been passed that buildings of more than one story be made of brick. Walls were designed with lovely arcades, and patios came alive with the plangent sounds of fountains. There were prominent doors and windows and heavy iron bolts and gratings, all of which adorned sturdy structures. As a finishing touch, magnificent wrought-iron lacework decorated the balconies of the two- and three-story dwellings. The French called the inner yards “courtyards,” for they were the heart, le coeur, of the household. The Spanish called them patios, a word that sounded like horses’ hoofs on cobblestones.

  Charles III of Spain died in 1788 and was succeeded by Charles IV, a weak and ineffectual ruler. Soon after, Father Antonio de Sedella (known as Père Antoine to the French) was sent to Louisiana as a representative of the dreaded Inquisition to introduce this tribunal to New Orleans. Governor Miró had the Commissary of the Inquisition arrested at night, put on board a ship, and taken back to Spain. In his official dispatch to the Spanish government, Miró commented: “When I read the communication of the Capuchin, I shuddered . . . The mere name of the Inquisition uttered in New Orleans would not only be sufficient to check immigration . . . but would also be capable of driving away those who have recently come . . .” (Gayarré 1974, 185).

  Father Antonio (Père Antoine) returned in 1795 and spent the rest of his life in New Orleans, where he assumed the role of pastor. Although he was a thorn in the side of the hierarchy, he was much loved by his parishioners. He died in 1829 at the age of eighty-one, mourned by Protestants and Catholics alike.

  In 1789, the foundation of the new St. Louis Cathedral was laid, to be built by the munificence of Don Andrès Almonester. The Cathedral, built at a cost of 100,000 pesos, was designed by the French architect Gilberto Guillemard. The central tower was built in 1819 by Benjamin Henry Latrobe to house the clock. The bell in the Cathedral is inscribed to commemorate the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. In 1825, Zapari, an Italian, decorated the interior of the Cathedral.

  Labor on this and other philanthropic projects sponsored by Don Almonester was completed by his slaves, who were masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and brick makers. Much of the raw material, such as lime and timber, came from his own forests.

  Also, due to the generosity of Almonester, the new Charity Hospital, named in honor of the Spanish king and costing more than 100,000 pesos, was completed in 1786. Almonsester endowed it with property, rents, and slaves, and drew up a list of hospital regulations which were very advanced for his day:

  The doctors must have studied at the colleges of Cadiz, Madrid or Barcelona . . . Special attention was to be given to the “poor in real distress” . . . Incurable or infectious patients were not to be admitted . . . All patients were to be supplied with a wooden bed, a table, bed clothing and garments for hospital wear. Almonester prepared a complete list of menus, which included a ration of meat.

  Treatment of disease . . . was designed to rid the body of corruption . . . and depended largely upon bleeding, sweating, blistering, purging, and vomiting (Davis 1971, 148).

  Physicians seemed to believe that the more loathsome the remedy, the quicker the cure. “Such remedies as crabs’ eyes, dried toads and urine were prescribed along with mercury, arsenic, antimony, camphor, opium, ammonia, alum, quinine, calomel, ipecac, hemlock, much wine and brandy, rhubarb, licorice and myrrh” (Davis 1971, 148).

  The cost of bleeding a patient was fifty cents; purging, one dollar; dressing a wound, fifty cents; and liquid medicine, twenty-five cents to one dollar.

  The disease of leprosy reached serious proportions in the early 1780s. On Miró’s recommendation, a leper hospital was built on Metairie Ridge behind New Orleans in 1875, to which Almonester contributed generously. The wild, primitive area soon came to be known as La Terre des Lepreux (Lepers’ Land). By the end of the Spanish period, the disease had almost completely disappeared.

  Baron de Carondelet

  In 1791, Francisco Luis Hector, Baron de Carondelet, known in Louisiana history as the City-Builder, began his administration. The civic improvements made during his term were many. A lighting system was created for New Orleans and a night police force was established, which was, necessarily, bi-lingual. To meet these expenses, a tax of $1.12½ was laid on every chimney. Consequently, the same chimney was used on all floors of a three-story house, thus stamping the Quarter, having been rebuilt after two fires, with a homogeneous architectural appearance.

  Carondelet built the Carondelet Canal (later called the Old Basin Canal), with the turning basin behind the present site of the Municipal Auditorium, which connected New Orleans with Bayou St. John, and thereby with Lake Pontchartrain, facilitating trade with the Gulf Coast cities that had been founded around the same time as New Orleans.

  To guard the city against attack, Carondelet built forts, redoubts, batteries, and deep ditches around the city. He made treaties with the Indians in the area, established a policy of free trade, and began the first newspaper in Louisiana, Moniteur de la Louisiane.

  The year 1795 saw the beginning of the granulation of sugar by Étienne de Boré, whose plantation was approximately six miles above New Orleans at the site of the present Audubon Park. Sugarcane had first been introduced in 1751 by the Jesuits. From it, syrup was made and a liquor called taffia. Granulation now opened up a tremendous market for sugar.

  In 1797, Carondelet left the ci
ty, having governed with outstanding ability. His successor, Brigadier-General Manuel Luis Gayoso de Lemos, died of yellow fever in 1799 and is the only Spanish governor to be buried in New Orleans.

  The Spanish governors after Gayoso were Marques de Casa Calvo, who served as acting governor from 1799 to 1801, and Don Juan Manuel de Salcedo, who served from 1801 to 1803, even though the Treaty of San Ildefonso had been signed in 1800, giving Louisiana back to France.

  The Treaty of San Ildefonso: Louisiana Retroceded to France

  Napoleon Bonaparte, after his glorious campaigns of 1796 and 1797, returned to France in 1799. He gathered an army, crossed the Alps into Italy, and in June 1800, defeated the Austrian army. Peace with Austria followed, and it seemed certain that peace with England would come soon.

  Napoleon now wished to revive France’s empire, chiefly Louisiana, which had been ceded to Spain by Louis XV. On October 1, 1800, by the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Charles IV, king of Spain, retroceded Louisiana to France. Historians are not clear as to why Charles agreed, but it was a demand made by a powerful ruler with recent conquests to his credit, which could not easily be denied. For whatever reason, this treaty, too, was kept secret, as peace had not yet been declared between France and England.

  In October 1801, preliminaries of peace were signed between England and France, and the retrocession of Louisiana to France became known in the United States. The news caused great excitement in the colony. When the Peace of Amiens was signed between England and France in March 1802, Napoleon began to prepare for the occupation and government of Louisiana.

  In the last decade of Spanish rule, there were forts on the four corners of the city and behind the Cathedral. Later, in the 1800s, they were demolished, but at this time, there were mounted guns in each fort, a moat (either natural or man-made), and barracks for one hundred men. When the forts were in use, the gates were closed at nine each night. The back gates led to the suburbs, which were almost as big as the city (composed of two hundred to three hundred houses). The Bayou Gate led to Gentilly, Metairie, and Grand Bayou. Metairie was comprised of “moi-toi” (you and me) partnerships between owner and farmer.