crowded with men of six nationalities, where the tricolor which for twenty days had floated over the city was slowly lowered and the stars and stripes slowly raised till they met midway of the staff and were saluted. The flag of the United States was then raised, while that of France was drawn down and delivered into the hands of a French officer. As he marched off toward the barracks with the flag wrapped about his waist, the Commissioners went back to the hall of the Cabildo and to a fine dinner made ready for them by the order of Laussat.

To the crowd that stood that day on the Place d'Armes the promise of Claiborne that this transfer should be the last meant nothing, for, within the lifetime of men then living, Louisiana had changed her rulers six times. Ninety-one years before, when scarcely a thousand white men dwelt on her soil, Louis XIV had farmed Louisiana to Antoine Crozat, the merchant monopolist of his day. Crozat, unable to use it, made it over in 1717 to John Law, Director-General of the Mississippi Company, which surrendered it in 1731 to Louis XV, who gave it in 1762 to the King of Spain, who made it over to Napoleon, who sold it to the United States.

In none of these many transfers was anything approaching a complete and accurate boundary ever drawn. When Claiborne received it on behalf of the United States the eastern boundary was the Mississippi river from its source to the parallel of thirty-one degrees. But where the source of the Mississippi was no man knew, and what became of the eastern boundary below the parallel of thirty-one degrees was long unsettled. Americans claimed at least as far as the Perdido river; but Spain would acknowledge no claim east of the Mississippi and below thirty-one degrees, save the island of New Orleans. The south boundary was, of course, the Gulf; but whether it went to the Sabine or the Rio Bravo was still unknown. The mountains, wherever they might be, were believed to bound it on the west, and the possessions of Great Britain, wherever they might be, to bound it on the north.

The territory shut in by these vague and general boundaries had been parted by the Spaniards into two great divisions.

1803.

SETTLEMENTS IN LOUISIANA.

15

The Creole who spoke of Louisiana was understood to mean the island of New Orleans and so much territory as lay west of the Mississippi from the Gulf to the town of New Madrid. All above New Madrid passed by the name of Spanish Illinois and sometimes of Upper Louisiana. A rude census taken in 1799 gave to Upper Louisiana a population of six thousand souls, and scattered them among a dozen petty settlements hard by the banks of the Missouri and the Mississippi. To Louisiana were given thirty-six thousand. Of these, some thirty-four thousand dwelt below the mouth of the Arkansas.

Indeed, the boatmen who steered the broadhorns as they floated down the Mississippi saw no town on the western bank between New Madrid and Pointe Coupée save the huts of a few Indian traders at the mouth of the Arkansas and a wretched hamlet called Concord opposite Natchez. Up the Red river were Rapide and Avoyelles and Natchitoches, which boasted of a population of sixteen hundred souls and of a great trade with Mexico. Below Pointe Coupée were three fourths of all the people and seven eighths of all the wealth of LouisiThe plantations, the cotton-fields, the houses became

ana.

more

plentiful as the traveller floated by the straggling settlements of Baton Rouge, of Manchoc Parish, of Iberville, below which cotton-fields and sugar-fields followed in unbroken succession to New Orleans.

To the Americans business or curiosity brought to Louisiana, the land and the people and the great city were a neverfailing source of interest and wonder. They filled their letters with accounts of the wide, yellow, tortuous river rushing along for hundreds of miles without a tributary of any kind; of the levees that shut in the waters and kept their surface high above all the neighboring country; of the bayous where the alligators basked in the sunshine; of the strange vegetation of

the

Cypress swamps and the palmettos; of the hanging moss, of the sloughs swarming with reptiles, of the pelicans, of the buzzards, of the herons, of the fiddler crabs, of houses without cellars, and of cemeteries where there was no such thing as a grave which had been dug. The town had been laid out in 1720 by the Sieur La Blonde de la Tour, acting under orders of Bienville, and had been laid out with all the regularity of

a military camp. Had it not been for the crescent shape of the river front, the plan would have been a parallelogram. On the three land sides were low ramparts at right angles to each other. On the river side was the levee. From the gate of France on the north to the gate of Tchoupitoulas on the south the distance was a mile, and precisely in the middle of the mile was the Place d'Armes. From the river back to the rampart which shut out the waters of the cypress swamp the distance was one third of a mile. Within these limits the streets were laid out at right angles, were each thirty-two French feet wide, and bore the names of the dukes and princes of France. One was Chartres, another was Orleans, another Maine, another Bourbon, another Toulouse. Still others were named Conti and Conde, and to these in time were added Dauphine and St. Louis.

Between the day when Bienville took up his headquarters at New Orleans and the day when Claiborne received the keys of its gates the town had grown much but changed little. The old fortifications had been much improved in 1798, and a slimy ditch, backed by an earth rampart and a wooden palisade, now surrounded the city. A few rusty guns mounted on five huge bastions constituted the chief defence. One bastion stood at each of the four corners. The fifth was in the rear of the city. The people still went in and out through four gateways guarded by sentries all day and carefully shut each night at nine. The four gates closed four thoroughfares. Through the river gate of France went the road to the plantations down the river. Through another went the bayou road, along which was just beginning to spring up the fashionable Faubourg St.-Jean. Through the southern river gate went the Tchoupitoulas road, and on this, where the plantation of the Jesuit fathers had once been, was the Faubourg Ste.-Marie. Of late years so many thousands of strangers, Frenchmen and Irishmen, Spaniards and Americans, had come to New Orleans that a new city was fast growing without the ramparts of the old.

With the strangers had come ships, commerce, and trade. Along the once sleepy levee, where in former times a dozen ships could rarely have been counted, were now to be seen two

1803.

THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS.

17

hundred ships and river craft drawn up three deep. It was mentioned with pride that in 1802 the products exported were worth two millions of dollars, that the imports had reached two millions and a half, and that ships registering in all thirty thousand tons-about the capacity of four ocean steamers had sailed from the port loaded. The condition. of the city, however, gave no indication of this commercial prosperity. The streets, save a few, were unpaved, undrained, and as filthy as in the days of Bienville and De la Tour. Each heavy thunder-storm turned the city into a pond and filled the streets from side to side inches deep with water. The mildest rain made them impassable with mud. In dry seasons they were rough with the mounds thrown up by the crayfish.

The buildings which bordered the streets were the admiration of every traveller. Men accustomed to the architecture of the cities of the North looked with wonder on the endless variety of form and the confusion of color displayed on every side. Some were of adobe with half-cylindrical tiled roofs. Some were of brick covered with yellow stucco faded and streaked by the sun and rain. On every hand were arcades and inner courts, open galleries and porte-cochères, verandas, lattices, dormer windows, and belvederes. No city in the North could produce such specimens of wrought-iron

work as adorned the balconies and were to be seen in the gateways, the transoms, the window gratings of the houses in New Orleans. No city could boast a finer public building than the Cabildo; no city could show a finer church than the St. Louis Cathedral. Yet among all these buildings not an exchange, not a tavern was to be seen; the levee and the coffee-houses did duty instead. Men who came to trade took up their quarters in the boarding-houses kept by mulattoes, and sought for the merchants on the levee. There, during the morning of each week-day, bales of cotton, casks of molasses, tobacco, sugar, flour, all the produce of Louisiana and all the produce of the Northwest, from hams and pork to the broadhorns which bore them down the Mississippi, were bought and sold. There in the cool of the day the people came to enjoy the air. Hardly had the sun set when the whole The coffee-houses then became crowded,

town was astir.

VOL. III.-3

the billiard-rooms grew noisy, the levee swarmed with people. Some came to take part in the dancing and drinking, the carousing and singing that went on upon the decks of the boats moored to the river bank. Some came to walk. Some to seek a mistress among the quadroons who, with their chaperons or their mothers, sat under the orange-trees that still lined the river-bank. The lot of these women was indeed an unhappy one! Their stain of white blood raised them far above the negroes; their stain of negro blood dragged them far below the whites. Law and custom forbade them to marry and left them to drag out a wretched existence or become the mistresses of the whites. To suppose that they bore any likeness to the prostitutes who plied their calling in the Northern cities would be a great mistake. They held a recognized place in the social scale, and that place, such as it was, no one considered dishonorable. No man addressed them till he had been properly introduced. No engagement was made till the mother approved, and, once made, it was kept most faithfully by the woman. They could not, indeed, attend the balls to which white women went; but their own assemblies were accounted splendid affairs and were attended by all the fine young men in the city. They could not enter the lower boxes at the theatre, but the upper boxes were set apart for them, and to these they were made welcome.

The theatre was then open on three nights each week. The beating of a drum gave notice of the nights, one of which was always Sunday. Sunday, indeed, was a gala day. Travellers from the North were horrified to see the shops open, the streets more gay, the market more crowded, the coffeehouses and the billiard-rooms more frequented, on Sunday than on any other day of the week. Religion, it is true, was not wholly neglected. To go to confession, to hear mass, to say a prayer in the cathedral, were duties regularly performed by even the most careless; but, these duties done, the rest of the day was spent in idleness and the pursuit of pleasure. To drop in at some coffee-house for a game of cards; to look on while an exciting game of billiards was played; to saunter to the rear of the city where on the marshes the negroes worshipped the spirits of good and evil with all the barbaric rites