New Orleans, 1718–1730

When and why was New Orleans founded?

In 1717 a French trading company run by the financier John Law, the Company of the West, took charge of Louisiane, France’s huge colony along the Mississippi. Its directors in Paris decided to build a town on the river and named it after Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who was ruling France for the child king Louis XV.

The man who chose the spot was Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a Canadian-born officer and the colony’s commander. His men cut the first cane between March and May 1718.

The land was not empty. Native people had lived on that ground for at least 600 years, and Bienville relied on Native guides to learn the river. He picked a strip of higher ground on a bend of the river, a natural levee where the water ran deep enough for ships to dock and the town could be defended.

What was early New Orleans like?

It was hard going. An explorer who saw the site in 1718, Bénard de la Harpe, said the ground was low and marshy, good for little except rice. Bienville wrote that June that he had too few workers, and about 50 convicts sent to do the clearing refused to work, ran off or died. The first houses were rough huts covered with bark and reeds, and settlers fought heat, mosquitoes and disease.

To find colonists, France rounded up “vagabonds”, debtors and petty swindlers and shipped them out, until a royal decree stopped the practice in May 1720. A census in November 1721 counted 470 people: 277 white settlers, 172 enslaved Black people and 21 enslaved Native people. Historian Richard Campanella sums it up: a good place for trade, but a poor place to live.

When did New Orleans become the capital of Louisiana?

Not at first. In January 1719 company officials chose Biloxi, on the Gulf coast, as the capital instead, partly because ships struggled with the river’s currents and the site flooded. In 1721 an engineer, Adrien de Pauger, drew up a neat grid of 66 blocks beside the river. His maps impressed Paris, and on 23 December 1721 the company made New Orleans the capital. The government moved there in 1722.

That September a powerful hurricane struck. From 10 to 13 September 1722 it wrecked about two-thirds of the houses, damaged the church and hospital, and wrecked five ships. The storm cleared away the crooked early huts, so Pauger’s streets could finally be laid out, levees raised and drainage ditches dug. Much of that rebuilding was done by enslaved workers. Pauger’s grid is the French Quarter today.

What was the Mississippi Bubble?

John Law’s company held the rights to France’s Mississippi lands, and people in Paris rushed to buy its shares. By 1719 it had become the Company of the Indies, controlling all of France’s colonial trade, and its share price soared from 500 to 18,000 livres. In 1720 the bubble burst. Investors were ruined and Law fled France in December 1720.

So New Orleans was born just as its owner went bust. The company carried on running the colony until 1731, when it handed Louisiana back to the French king.

How did slavery begin in New Orleans?

Enslaved Africans reached Louisiana from the Caribbean as early as 1706, but the first ships straight from Africa came in June 1719. The Duc du Maine and the Aurore carried about 450 people bought at Whydah, in today’s Benin. They landed on the Gulf coast at Dauphin Island or Biloxi, not at New Orleans. The company wanted people who knew how to grow rice, and the Aurore carried rice seed.

Between 1719 and 1731 more than 6,000 Africans were brought to the colony, mostly from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin. They cleared land, built levees, dug canals and worked as sailors, carpenters, cooks and nurses. Many resisted, by working slowly or escaping to the swamps or to Native villages.

In 1724 France issued the Code Noir for Louisiana, a law of 55 articles. It treated enslaved people as property, banned marriage between Black and white people, made freedom very hard to win and set harsh punishments.

Which Native nations lived around New Orleans?

The Chitimacha nation lived along the lower river and its bayous. French raiders had been capturing Chitimacha people to sell as slaves, and in 1706 some Chitimacha killed a missionary, Father St. Cosme. Bienville then turned allied nations against them in a war that lasted twelve years. The tribe’s own history says many Chitimacha were enslaved in that time. Peace was made with Bienville in the new town in 1718, and the Chitimacha gave up their land on the river. They then traded deerskins, bear oil and salt at New Orleans, and the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana still lives on Bayou Teche.

Upriver, French settlers spread onto the land of the Natchez. In late November 1729 the commander at Fort Rosalie demanded that a Natchez village be cleared for a plantation. The Natchez attacked the fort and nearby farms, killing more than 200 French settlers and soldiers, and taking women, children and enslaved Africans captive. Some accounts say a few enslaved Africans joined the Natchez, though historians still debate their part. Governor Périer sent soldiers and enslaved men to destroy a village of the Chaouacha, who had no part in it, and Choctaw warriors led the fighting that followed. By 1731 many Natchez had been captured and sold into slavery in Saint-Domingue.

Who were the Ursuline nuns?

In February 1727 twelve women sailed from France under Mother Marie Tranchepain, a nun of the Ursuline order. They were in New Orleans by early August 1727. Under a contract with the Company of the Indies they ran the military hospital, and they opened a school for girls. They also taught religion to free and enslaved Native and African women and girls, and after 1729 they took in orphans of the Natchez war. The Old Ursuline Convent that stands today was completed in 1751.

What did New Orleans trade in the 1720s?

In the 1720s its trade was still small. Deerskins came from Native hunters, and the colony sent out naval stores: tar and pitch for ships. Settlers grew tobacco, and indigo, a plant that makes blue dye, was being tried by 1724. Both became the colony’s main crops later in the century, grown by enslaved people.

The colony depended on supply ships from France, and food often ran short.