Louisiana, a southeastern state bordered on the west by the Sabine River, Texas, and Oklahoma; on the north by Arkansas; to the east by the Mississippi and Pearl Rivers and the state of Mississippi; and to the south by the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana's French and Spanish history endowed the state with a rich and unique cultural heritage, while its geographic location at the mouth of the Mississippi River profoundly affected its historical development.
The Colonial Period
Humans reached present-day Louisiana some ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age. By approximately 1,000 B.C., the area's Paleo-Indian peoples had constructed systems of large, earthen mounds that still exist at Poverty Point and elsewhere in the state. At the time of European contact, Louisiana's Indian population included the Caddos, Attakapas, Muskegons, Natchez, Chitimachas, and Tunicas. During the eighteenth century, other Indian groups from the British colonies to the east, such as the Choctaws, relocated in Louisiana.
During the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadores, including Hernando De Soto, explored present-day Louisiana but did not settle it. European colonization of Louisiana began as an extension of French Canada, established as a fur-trading center in the early seventeenth century. As the century progressed, French control extended throughout the Great Lakes region. In 1672, Father Jacques Marquette explored the Mississippi River as far south as Arkansas, heightening interest in a Gulf Coast colony. By the early 1680s, the French nobleman René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, attempted to realize the French vision of a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River anchoring a central North American empire. Retracing Marquette's route in spring 1682, La Salle arrived at the river's mouth in early April. He claimed the entire Mississippi basin for France and named the area Louisiana for King Louis XIV. In 1684, La Salle attempted to establish a permanent colony, but his ill-fated expedition failed to locate the Mississippi River from the open sea and landed in present-day Texas. The settlement foundered, and in 1687 La Salle's own men murdered him.
Not until the late 1690s did France again attempt to establish a colony in Louisiana. This time the leader was the Canadian nobleman and French military officer Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville. Joined by his brother Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, and succeeding where La Salle had failed, Iberville located the Mississippi River from the open sea in spring 1699 and established a series of coastal settlements during the next several years. Whereas Iberville did not spend much time in Louisiana, succumbing to yellow fever in 1706, Bienville participated in colonial affairs for the next forty years, serving as military governor several times and founding New Orleans in 1718.
Initially a royal colony, Louisiana soon burdened the treasury and in 1712 became a proprietary colony under Antoine Crozat, who failed to make the colony profitable and in 1717 relinquished his charter. The crown then selected the Scotsman John Law as the new proprietor. An innovative financier, Law devised a plan in which the Royal Bank of France would underwrite Louisiana through Law's Company of the Indies. This Mississippi Bubble burst in the early 1720s, and Law fled France. A reorganized Company of the Indies led Louisiana to modest growth, but prosperity eluded the colony. The company surrendered its charter in 1731, and Louisiana remained a royal colony until French rule ended.
Louisiana's relatively late founding, semitropical climate, and undeserved reputation as a refuge for undesirables inhibited population growth. The oldest permanent European settlement in present-day Louisiana, Natchitoches, was founded in 1714. During the 1720s, several hundred German and Swiss immigrants settled along what is still called the Mississippi River's "German Coast." Baton Rouge was also founded in the 1720s but languished until the 1760s. Despite slow demographic growth, a distinct group of Creoles—native-born descendants of European settlers—eventually emerged, but by the 1760s, only about 5,000 whites inhabited Louisiana.
Problems of government compounded those of population. Louisiana chronically suffered from neglect by France and from lack of regular communication. Unclear lines of authority led to frequent quarrels among officials. Most importantly, as the product of an absolute monarchy, Louisiana failed to develop representative institutions, such as a colonial legislature, that could limit either the prerogatives or the abuses of royal appointed officials. Consequently, corruption and centralized power have historically characterized Louisiana government.
The 1763 Peace of Paris ended the French and Indian War and compelled France to relinquish its North American empire. France surrendered Louisiana east of the Mississippi River to England, and land west of the river to Spain, a French ally. Word of Spanish rule prompted discontent in New Orleans, a situation worsened by delay and confusion over the formal transfer of power. Resentment increased until 1768, when New Orleans revolted against Spanish rule. Authorities suppressed the insurrection the next year and executed several leaders.
Despite this difficult transition, Spanish Louisiana enjoyed stability and progress. Effective governors provided strong leadership, and generous land grants encouraged immigration. The free white population increased to more than 20,000 by 1800 and displayed much ethnic diversity, as Spaniards, Canary Islanders, Britons, Americans, Acadian exiles (today's Cajuns), and refugees from the French Revolution of the 1790s settled in Louisiana. The Spanish colony also enjoyed economic growth. The main crops during French rule had been tobacco and indigo, which brought little profit. During the 1790s, invention of the cotton gin and production of sugar in Louisiana precipitated an economic revolution.
Slave labor drove the new economic prosperity. Under French rule the colony's slave population had been small, about 4,000 by the early 1760s, and ethnically unified, as most slaves originated from West Africa's Sene-gambia region. Under Spanish rule the slave population increased to more than 16,000 and displayed ethnic complexity, as slaves were imported from various points throughout Africa. By the late eighteenth century, a distinct "Afro-Creole" culture combining African, Indian, and European influences had developed.
During the American Revolution, with Spain aiding the colonies, Governor Bernardo de Galvez led attacks against British East and West Florida that secured Spanish control of the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. After American independence, tensions grew between Spain and the United States over American access to the Mississippi River and the northern border of West Florida. These issues were resolved in 1795 with Pinckney's Treaty, in which Spain acquiesced to American demands.
Napoleon Bonaparte's 1799 ascension to power in France revived dreams of a French New World empire, and the following year Napoleon forced Spain to retro-cede Louisiana. News of this development prompted President Thomas Jefferson to initiate negotiations for the purchase of New Orleans. Talks went slowly, but by April 1803, Napoleon decided to sell all of Louisiana to the United States, resulting in the Louisiana Purchase Treaty.
The Nineteenth Century
American acquisition of Louisiana provoked Creole resentment and confronted the United States with the challenge of incorporating territory and people from outside the British tradition. Jefferson appointed W. C. C. Claiborne territorial governor and granted him broad powers to handle this unprecedented situation. Americans and their slaves swarmed into Louisiana: between 1803 and 1820 the white population increased from 21,000 to 73,000, and the slave population from 13,000 to 34,000. This migration transformed the Creoles into a distinct minority and sparked Anglo-Creole conflict over language, legal traditions, religion, and cultural practices. Although the Creoles eventually became reconciled to American rule, tensions lingered for many years.
In 1804, Congress created the Territory of Orleans—the future state of Louisiana—and later authorized election of a territorial legislature, which divided the territory into parishes (counties) and created local government. In 1810, the overwhelmingly American residents of Spanish West Florida rebelled and petitioned for U.S. annexation. Congress granted the request, and the area west of the Pearl River became part of the Territory of Orleans. The next year, Congress authorized a constitutional convention, half the delegates to which were Creoles, indicating their accommodation to American rule and republican government. Louisiana's 1812 constitution was a conservative document, reflecting its framers' suspicion of direct democracy and their belief in private property as the basis for citizenship. Congress admitted Louisiana as the eighteenth state on 30 April 1812, and Claiborne was elected the first governor, demonstrating further Creole reconciliation. Louisiana's geographical boundaries were finalized with the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, which set the boundary between the United States and Spanish Mexico and defined Louisiana's western border.
Soon after Louisiana's statehood, the United States declared war on Britain. The War of 1812 culminated with General Andrew Jackson's victory in the Battle of New Orleans, which occurred before news of an armistice arrived from Europe. Jackson's triumph made him a national hero and guaranteed American westward expansion, but many New Orleanians resented Jackson for his declaring martial law and for his enlisting free black men to fight. Nonetheless, the Place des Armes was later renamed Jackson Square in his honor.
Before the Whig and Democratic parties emerged nationally during the late 1820s, state politics revolved around Louisiana's cultural, geographic, and economic divisions: Anglo-Creole, north-south, cotton-sugar, city-country. Organized parties partially redefined political alignments. Sugar planters, New Orleans professionals, and personal opponents of Jackson supported the Whigs, while cotton planters, the New Orleans working classes, and small farmers endorsed the Democrats. Louisiana's economic and demographic growth between 1820 and 1840 exacerbated political divisions and made the 1812 constitution obsolete. The white population grew from 73,000 to 158,000, while the slave population jumped from nearly 70,000 to more than 168,000. Much of northern Louisiana—previously sparsely populated—was settled, cotton and sugar production mushroomed, and New Orleans became a major commercial center. These changes, combined with the nationwide advance of Jacksonian Democracy, prompted Democratic calls for political reform, which the Whigs initially resisted but assented to by the early 1840s. The 1845 constitution heralded Jacksonian Democracy by inaugurating universal manhood suffrage, reining in the power of banks and corporations, and moving the capital from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, which was closer to the state's geographic center.
Before the Civil War, free African Americans further enhanced Louisiana's uniqueness. Resulting from Spanish manumission law, miscegenation, and the arrival of several thousand free-black refugees fleeing the Haitian slave revolt of the 1790s, Louisiana's free-black population was the Deep South's largest, peaking in 1840 at more than 25,000. Although relegated to second-class citizenship and largely impoverished, the free people of color nonetheless included a racially mixed elite, also called "Creoles," many of whom were French-speaking, wealthy, educated, and active in cultural and intellectual circles. After 1840, legal restrictions on manumission caused a decline in the number of free black people, who nonetheless would provide important leadership within the black community after the abolition of slavery.
The question of slavery consumed the nation during the 1850s, and, following Abraham Lincoln's election as president in 1860, Louisiana seceded on 26 January 1861, the sixth state to do so. By late April 1862, federal forces had captured New Orleans, and the city became a Unionist and Republican stronghold during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Union triumph also prompted thousands of slaves to flee from nearby plantations and to seek protection from occupying federal forces, thereby helping to redefine the Civil War as a war against slavery. Under Lincoln's wartime Reconstruction plan, a Unionist state government was formed in early 1864 that formally abolished slavery. However, Confederate troops defeated a Union attempt to capture the Confederate state capital at Shreveport in 1864, and Louisiana remained politically and militarily divided until the war ended.
The Confederacy's defeat brought Reconstruction to the South. Even by the standards of the time, Louisiana was rife with violence. The New Orleans riot of 30 July 1866, in which white mobs killed black and white Republicans, helped scuttle President Andrew Johnson's restoration plan. The 1868 constitution instituted black suffrage and brought the Republican Party to power. Republicans attempted to fashion a biracial coalition that would implement economic and political reforms and achieve racial equality, but they could not overcome corruption, factionalism, and violent white opposition. The 1873 Colfax massacre, in which more than one hundred black men were slain, was the bloodiest event in the Reconstruction South and resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that undermined federal enforcement of black civil rights. By 1876, Louisiana Republicans were in retreat, and the state's electoral votes were contested in that year's presidential election, a dispute decided by the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction and returned Louisiana Democrats to power.
Reconstruction's demise inaugurated the state's Bourbon period, characterized by the rule of a wealthy, reactionary oligarchy that retained power until the 1920s and relegated Louisiana to economic underdevelopment. White supremacy, fiscal conservatism, electoral fraud, and contempt for the public good were the hallmarks of Bourbon rule, as even the modest gains of Reconstruction, such as creation of a state education system, were undone. Nothing reflected the Bourbon mindset better than the notorious Louisiana lottery, the corrupting influence of which attracted national opprobrium, and the convict-lease system, which sometimes subjected the overwhelmingly black inmates to annual mortality rates of twenty percent. The Bourbons' crowning achievements were the segregationist laws enacted during the 1890s, the blatant electoral fraud that prevented a Populist-Republican coalition from taking power in 1896, and the property and literacy requirements and poll tax provision of the 1898 constitution that deprived almost all blacks, and thousands of poor whites, of the right to vote, thus completely overturning Reconstruction. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which sanctioned legal segregation, originated as a challenge to Louisiana's 1890 law requiring racially segregated accommodations on railroad cars in the state.
The Twentieth Century
The history of Louisiana was profoundly altered with the 1901 discovery of oil in the state. For the rest of the century, Louisiana's economic fortunes were pinned to those of the oil industry. The Progressive movement of the early twentieth century brought little change to Louisiana, dominated as it was by the Bourbon elite, except for implementation of the severance tax—a tax on natural resources that are "severed" from the earth—and creation of the white party primary system.
Louisiana experienced a political revolution with the 1928 election of Huey P. Long as governor. Long employed populistic rhetoric in appealing to the common people and in promising to unseat the entrenched elites. As governor and, after 1932, as United States senator, Long oversaw a vast expansion in public works and social services, building roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals, and providing free medical care and textbooks, all funded by increases in the severance tax and the state's bonded debt. In 1934, Long created the Share-the-Wealth movement, with its motto "Every Man a King," in which he promised to tax the wealthy in order to provide economic security for all American families. Intended as an alternative to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Share-the-Wealth won over millions of impoverished Americans and raised the possibility of Long challenging Roosevelt's 1936 reelection. However, Long's undemocratic methods, which included using the state's coercive power to stifle political dissent, combined with his presidential aspirations, provoked opposition and heightened fears of his becoming an American dictator. Long was assassinated in September 1935, allegedly by a political opponent, although controversy has continued to surround this event. Long left an ambiguous legacy: he improved daily life for common people, but his dictatorial tactics, corrupt practices, and centralization of power were in keeping with Louisiana traditions, and, despite Long's successes, Louisiana remained amongst the nation's poorest states.
For the next twenty-five years, contests between Longite and anti-Longite—or reform—factions of the Democratic Party characterized Louisiana politics. In 1939, a series of exposés revealing widespread corruption sent many leading Longites to prison and brought the reformers to power. Between 1940 and 1948, the reformers continued the popular public works and social services of Longism while also implementing changes, including civil service, designed to end Longism's abuses. Military spending during World War II and, later, the expansion of the petrochemical industry along the Mississippi River financed much of the reform program. In 1940, war games known as the Louisiana Maneuvers greatly improved U.S. military preparedness, and during the war, the New Orleans businessman Andrew Jackson Higgins designed and built military transport boats that proved essential to the Allied war effort.
From 1948 to 1960, Earl K. Long, Huey's younger brother and himself a formidable historical figure, dominated Louisiana politics. Long, who finished the unexpired gubernatorial term of Richard Leche, 1939–1940, quickly became a political power in his own right. During two nonconsecutive gubernatorial terms (1948–1952, 1956–1960), Earl Long continued the public works and social services aspects of Longism; he also engaged in some of Longism's abuses but nothing near those of his brother.
Earl Long was also progressive on the question of race. As the civil rights movement gained momentum after World War II, and as the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision invalidated segregated schools, Earl Long strongly supported black civil rights by permitting black voter registration, ensuring that black people benefited from his economic programs, and trying to persuade white Louisianians to abandon segregation. Despite these efforts, white support for legal segregation remained strong, and the desegregation of public schools and of Louisiana as a whole proceeded slowly. Legal segregation had been dismantled in Louisiana by the early 1970s, but as the twentieth century ended, desegregation in certain local school systems, including Baton Rouge, remained under federal court supervision.
During the last third of the twentieth century, Louisiana experienced some of the same trends that affected the rest of the South, including the reemergence of the Republican Party, suburbanization, and cultural homogenization, but the state also continued to be plagued by many of its traditional difficulties, including political corruption and economic underdevelopment. Louisiana's fortunes during these years were greatly reflected in those of Edwin W. Edwards, who served an unprecedented four full gubernatorial terms (1972–1980, 1984–1988, 1992– 1996). The charismatic Edwards followed in the populistic, big-government traditions of Longism while involving himself in many legally questionable activities. Edwards's first two terms witnessed major increases in state spending, financed by oil revenues, but the 1980s oil bust had devastating consequences for Louisiana's economy and for Edwards's third term. Edwards won a fourth term in 1992, but only because his opponent was David Duke, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party whose meteoric political rise was propelled by economic distress and white resentment. After the 1980s, the state government slowly weaned itself off oil as its primary source of revenue, a process helped by the adoption of a state lottery and legalized gambling during the early 1990s and by the national economic growth of the following years. Nonetheless, the state's regressive tax system—sales taxes became the main sources of revenue while the popular homestead exemption enables most homeowners to pay little or no property taxes—resulted in chronic funding problems. Louisiana's 2000 population of 4,468,976 marked only a 5.9 percent increase from 1990, less than half the national increase of 13.1 percent, and the early twenty-first century witnessed a continuing "brain drain," as many of the state's younger, educated residents pursued better economic opportunities elsewhere.
Bibliography
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Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
Kurtz, Michael L., and Morgan D. Peoples. Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
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