French 1718 outpost that became America’s Creole port
New Orleans, the Louisiana river city nicknamed NOLA and the Big Easy, was founded by the French in 1718, ruled by Spain for decades, and sold to the United States in 1803. By 1840 it was the third most populous American city, and in 2020 it counted 383,997 residents.
Choctaw speakers called the area Bulbancha, meaning land of many tongues. In spring 1718 Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, acting for the French Mississippi Company, founded La Nouvelle-Orléans on Chitimacha land, honouring Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, regent for the boy king Louis XV. Enslaved Africans arrived in large numbers by the early 1720s, and the Code Noir of 1724 codified their bondage. Ursuline nuns opened a convent school for girls in 1727, and their old convent is the notable exception among the French Quarter’s surviving 18th-century buildings, most of which date from Spanish rule.
France handed Louisiana to Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Residents revolted in 1768, briefly holding the city and petitioning Paris, but Louis XV confirmed Spanish sovereignty, and the town was called Nueva Orleans until 1800. That year Spain returned the colony to France, and Napoleon sold it to the United States in 1803. Refugees from the Haitian Revolution poured in, and the 1809 wave from Cuba alone, just over 9,000 people, doubled the population.
In January 1811 some 500 enslaved people on the German Coast upriver rose and marched toward the city in what has been called the largest slave revolt in American history. On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson’s mixed army of militia, regulars, frontiersmen and Jean Lafitte’s privateers routed 11,000 British troops. After 1808 the city ran the nation’s largest slave market, even as it hosted the country’s largest and wealthiest community of free people of color.
Mardi Gras, Creole food and music now define its image, but low ground and heavy rain leave it exposed. Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 flooded more than 80 percent of the city, killed over 1,300 people and cut the population by more than half.
Source: New Orleans
