Southern Discomfort
In 1861, New Orleans was the jewel in the Confederate crown, the fourth largest city in the country and unquestionably the richest in the South. With the outbreak of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln made certain this ripe plum fell hard and fast. He put her conquest at the top of his priority list for the simple reason that whoever held the city controlled the mouth of the Mississippi River, and he sweetened the deal by promising to make whoever took New Orleans a lieutenant-general in the Union Army. Anticipating the attack, the Confederacy beefed up defenses at Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which faced each other seventy miles downriver, and went on the offensive when they learned the Union Navy had entered the river from the Gulf of Mexico....
Read MoreBrave New World
Louisiana’s Cane River Colony was a daring dream made real by an ex-slave named Marie Thérèse Coincoin. The facts about her astonishing achievement have been wildly compromised over the centuries, but what I’ve set down here is true enough. Marie was born in 1742 to African slave parents in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and bore four children, fathers unknown. She was eventually leased to a Frenchman, Claude Pierre Metoyer, a union producing ten more issue. In 1778, Metoyer bought and freed Marie and gave her a cabin and 68 acres of rich land where the industrious Marie grew indigo and tobacco and sold medicines and bearskins. She eventually earned enough to buy land on Isle Brevelle, a sliver of land thirty miles long and a few miles wide between the Cane and Old...
Read More“Let him who wishes continue.”
Louisiana abounds with tales of antebellum sugar kings and their baronial estates. For extravagance and tragedy, few eclipse Valcour Aimé, the “Louis XIV of Louisiana” and his home, Petit Versailles. Wondering what remained, I drove up the Great River Road some years back and found lush cane fields crowding the bones of what had been the grandest private garden in the Americas. The big house had been lost to a fire in 1920, but old photos and journals gave a glimpse of the grandeur that was. François-Gabriel “Valcour” Aimé was born into wealth in St. Charles Parish in 1798 but never rested on his lofty laurels. After buying a string of sugar plantations, he experimented with refining methods and developed a vacuum pan system revolutionizing the...
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