American Friends of Lafayette - Louisiana

DID YOU KNOW . . . BEFORE THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

Eight years before 1776, the people of New Orleans staged the first revolt against a European power on this continent, and almost no one remembers it. ⚜️

When France quietly handed Louisiana to Spain in a secret treaty, the French Creoles of New Orleans were not consulted and were not pleased. They had built a city in the mud, buried their dead in it, and thought of themselves as French to the bone. In 1766 Spain sent its first governor, Antonio de Ulloa, a brilliant scientist but a cautious, aloof administrator who never even formally took possession of the colony.

Resentment festered. Spanish trade rules threatened Creole merchants. In October 1768, led by planters, merchants, and lawyers, a crowd rose up, spiked the cannons at the gate, and demanded Ulloa leave. The governor boarded a ship and sailed away. For a brief, giddy season, the colonists governed themselves and even flirted with the idea of a republic, years before the thirteen colonies dared to.

It did not last. In 1769 Spain sent General Alejandro O'Reilly with two thousand soldiers. He restored order without a fight, then arrested the ringleaders. Five were executed by firing squad, others imprisoned. History remembered him harshly as Bloody O'Reilly, though he went on to build much of the Spanish New Orleans we still walk through today.

The rebels lost. But think about what they attempted. Ordinary colonists looked at a distant empire that traded them away like furniture and said no, we will decide who governs us. They failed eight years before Lexington and Concord, and the men who succeeded later never knew their names.

New Orleans has always been a city that will not simply be told what it is. That habit did not start with jazz or Mardi Gras. It started with a handful of Creoles who ran an empire's governor out of town and dared to imagine they were free.

A brief history of New Orleans. Yes, it cuts corners, but you probably have to when trying to cram 300 years of history into about 35 minutes. For the most part, accurate and interesting.

How America's Richest City Became Its Most Dangerous: New Orleans, Louisiana A documentary tracing New Orleans from its 1718 founding on a Missi...

For twenty strange days in the winter of 1803, the people of New Orleans went to bed unsure of which country they lived in. In the span of three weeks, Louisiana flew the flags of three different nations, and the whole handover played out on one balcony above the Place d'Armes. ⚜️

For decades Louisiana had been ruled by Spain, but in secret Spain had already agreed to hand it back to Napoleon's France. So on the last day of November 1803, Spanish officials formally returned the colony to France, and the crowd in the square watched the Spanish flag come down and the French tricolor rise in its place.

The French rule that followed lasted barely twenty days. Napoleon, desperate for money and unwilling to defend a colony an ocean away, had already sold the entire territory to the young United States. And so on the twentieth of December, the ceremony repeated itself in front of the Cabildo. The French flag was lowered one final time, and by some accounts it was caught before it touched the ground, wrapped with care, and carried away by weeping Creoles who knew their world had just ended.

Up the pole went the flag of the United States. In a single afternoon, the French and Spanish Creoles of New Orleans, Catholic, French speaking, with their own laws and customs, went to sleep as citizens of a Protestant, English speaking republic that knew almost nothing about them.

They did not melt away. They held on to their language, their faith, their food, and their law with a stubbornness that still defines this place. Louisiana became American on paper that December day, but in its heart it quietly refused to stop being itself. And in many ways, it never has. 🌟