“Long in the back of my mind was the thought of one day tackling a history of New Orleans,” Lawrence N. Powell writes, but Hurricane Katrina pushed him to turn possibility into reality. The calamitous storm of 2005 forced him “to think differently about the city,” offended as he was by “all those promiscuous statements about how my adopted hometown should be allowed to slide back into the primordial ooze.” People who knew little or nothing about New Orleans were asking: “Why rebuild a sinking metropolis on a site that shouldn’t have been selected in the first place?” Powell found the question “hurtful” but agreed that it “deserved a respectful answer.”
So now we have what Powell calls “a stab at an honest answer.” It is in fact a great deal more than that. Powell, who holds an endowed chair in history at Tulane University, has written in “The Accidental City” what should stand for years as the definitive history of New Orleans’s first century, the period that he regards as central to the city’s formation and its character. His study covers the time from its establishment in the famous southern crescent of the Mississippi River in the early 18th century to its sale by Napoleon to the United States, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803. Powell rounds out its century with a brief account of Andrew Jackson’s stunning victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, “a watershed in the young nation’s history . . . chiefly because the victory established once and for all that the United States was no longer a colony — not even in feeling, let alone in fact.”
The coming into being of New Orleans is a dramatic story but not an especially pretty one, populated as it is by rogues, scoundrels, opportunists, slavers and a vast congregation of ne’er-do-wells. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the young French Canadian who chose the site and presided over its early development, never will enjoy the saintly status that for generations has been bestowed on the founding fathers. Bienville, though both a street and a hotel in the French Quarter are named in his honor, is a most unlikely candidate for canonization, given that the vast Le Moyne clan was deep into cronyism and nepotism, and that he “accumulated enemies the way some people collect coins.” He was canny, not unduly scrupulous, but also “an intrepid commander, a tough bureaucratic infighter, and an even more astute Indian diplomatist,” this last being especially important as peaceful relations with nearby Indian tribes were essential.
Bienville came to the French colony in the Lower Mississippi Valley as an adventurer but stayed to become its leading citizen. France wanted to wean its citizens from their addiction to English tobacco and hoped to establish tobacco as a crop in the colony. What eventually became known as the Mississippi Company was established to that end, and a search was begun for the location of its “company town.” Bienville got in on the ground floor of this operation — he was as avaricious as he was ambitious — and in time rather arbitrarily chose the site in the crescent. There were difficulties galore — the chief one being the river itself, “powerful and unstable, hard to enter at its mouth, harder still to navigate, because of its currents” — and there were other prospective sites that may or may not have been more feasible, but Bienville stood firm:
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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