Thread by @Irkutyanin1

Most important city to understand America.

This is going to be a thread on a long held secondary interest of mine, New Orleans’ history as a capital of a second North American nation. NO was the first to be consumed, and yet the longest surviving alternative to a Protestant, Anglophone America.

Every book is archived

The Creole city at the heart of francophone American countries is not just the largest and most important port in America, it was located on the ideal location to create a stranglehold on future US trade. The weakness was French colonial settlement policies vis a vis England.

The French did not send it’s Calvinist dissenters nor its ethno-linguistic minorities overseas for supporting a regal pretender. The population of the Delta was slow to grow despite its greater sprawl to the river beds to link the Caribbean to the St. Lawrence.

The question of southern Louisiana expansion, especially for the French, was a human capital problem, which exacerbated logistical issues surmounted in the East Coast by the Ocean itself. Trans-Allegheny Anglo ventures, however, were notoriously slow and painful.

The two books above this post detail the character of old New Orleans, it was a Creole (settler-aristocracy) nation, and it was constrained both by the natural limitations of French Human capital and the unrelenting Mississippi, as much of a hindrance to NO growth as vital to it.

The position of New Orleans made it absolutely irreplaceable as a strategic asset, if there was going to be an America beyond the Alleghenies, it had to have New Orleans above all else, and it had to be able to defend it. The British understood this as much as Jefferson.

In a move rarely repeated, the trade off was that the Creoles could keep power, because they represented in the city itself the most established power base of Louisiana, as well as the most French. It could not be overwhelmed by settlers or forced into the state parameters.

So a truce was offered instead, outpost towns like St Louis, Arkansas Post, Detroit, Vincennes, Biloxi, and Mobile were all subsumed into the Anglo framework of statehood, Louisiana retained not only a separate linguistic existence, but a separate legal and social structure.

The ghost of this is alive today, and occasionally it is made into a easy punching bag by both conformist legal objections and accusations of being tainted by the original sin of Louisiana.

It should be noted, however, Creole racial class was closer to Latin colonial models

This paradigm was likely meant to be temporary, but Creole populations got significant boosts from the revolutions of Haiti and France, many of who formed the core of a much needed Francophone population growth and construction boom after the two disastrous fires in the 1780’s.

Despite taking in both Irish and Anglo-Protestants into the state, the local power was controlled firmly by a strong, educated, and virtually autonomous local majority of Francophone Catholics, who had capital in both the human and fiscal sense to undertake a building boom.

The city itself undertook rapid expansion antebellum, to its actual limits many would say. The constraint of the flood lands that stood beyond the colonial heights were not suitable to further outward expansion, but the antebellum Creoles had an older “solution”

The Creole’s moved the capital further upriver to Baton Rouge, which they rebuilt to their styles and local tastes. The antebellum culture of New Orleans was the dominating social and political structure of the state, capable of independent work on its own terms.

The Ursuline Order became a famous independent autonomous educational institution, along with the Jesuits for upper class city Creoles. As one might imagine at this point, so many layers of autonomy, linguistic, cultural, and political would not fare well in the war.

The capture of New Orleans marked a watershed moment, not only for the fate of the Creoles and their separate culture, but for America overall, the resulting bloody decades were a prequel to the slaughter of 20th century cities, pursued in the same spirit of a new form of siege.

The political power was shifted overnight with the victory of the Union, in theory to the black population which had not fought for the Confederacy, in reality to Anglo carpetbagging interests, the ensuing two decades was a continual low level four way ethnic war.

Disgruntled Anglo antebellum white settlers, some who even fought for the confederacy, became opportunistic scallawags to bolster carpetbaggers, while the well off antebellum mullato was often less loyal to the new regime.

The result in NO was unparalleled crime explosion.

New Orleans as the seedy, morally lax, violent port pleasure destination has its roots in this time period, amidst the back drop of general confusion and gang warfare.

Grand Duke Alexis visited during this time.

(only book in this thread not on libgen yet)

However, the end of Reconstruction reestablished some normalcy, though the Creoles were never in an uncontested position of power ever again. They maintained their ethnic and linguistic neighborhoods in NO but were not domineering over state politics, which had shifted momentum.

Anglos now made up the majority of the state, and if not the city of New Orleans yet, inroads had been made. The NO Creoles became one ethnic neighborhood enclave out of many in America, the attempt at destroying them in reconstruction failed, but they were permanently weakened.

This line of neighborhood frontlines would hold until it received an unexpected shock:

The massive public works period of NO and Louisiana floodland reclamation.

This massive public work would fundamentally shift the demographic enclaves of Louisiana, and obliterate the Creoles

The Great Mississippi flood of 1927 caused a dollar equivalent flood of $1 trillion dollars of damage overall, but in NO this destruction extended to lower and newer built parts of the city and the poor shantytowns on the outskirts mostly inhabited by the black population.

The Army Corps of Engineers, during the cleanup and aftermath of 1928 set up an unauthorized levee along the recently industrial canal. It was not a permanent solution, but it would work until a permanent project deciding what to do about controlling water on the Mississippi.

The housing projects were approved as a solution to the problem “solved” by the Industrial canal and the temporary levees, the old impoverished towns would become new housing communities, city neighborhoods all their own in the now unflooded land. The HANO was founded.

This was expected to be a solution to multiple problems. The black population would no longer be pressed in on on the Creoles and Anglos of the Old and mid towns, it was a Fordist/Longian proposition to the problems still posed by the low level conflict of NO.

The infrastructure increase, however, would outmaneuver the city planning. The contemporaneous construction of 61 from Chicago to New Orleans encouraged early exodus of the city center, crucially amongst working and middle class Creoles. The result was gradually declining French.

The ethno-linguistic bond was weakened by capital driven alternatives to city life, but even where such elite self sustaining life was possible, it was under new threats by old allies that had seemingly changed overnight.

The desegregation of the Archdiocese of New Orleans was infact a power push from the outside, it had its friends in the local Society of Jesus, now with nearly universal control over elite local educational institutions. This was not the position of the local Jesuits before WW2

This had the further effect of alienating old Catholics who had but children in the archdiocesan schools over the public schools, and put pressure on the middle New Orleans to secularize and vacate with familiar pressures to my followers.

What was the result? Decay.

Even after the 1965 warning that the levees needed to be rebuilt, the capital to do so was no longer in the city itself. NO followed an intense de industrialization Delta model that was complete before decay was perceived elsewhere.

The “Chocolate City”, an Anglophone tourist parody of its former self was born, the Creoles were, in effect, no more than genetic and surname memory. The city became a party town once more with harder narcotics. The first real “American Rio” was born out of the Catholic port.

It’s not even pretended like it will be rebuilt. NO does not have the people or agency to make itself the capital of an alternative America. Which is why it’s festering rot is left in the open. Here is the trophy of a USG victory utilizing only the weapons of social coercion.

@PyotrNemets @ByFisted @Horacethe1st @hansof20