History and Culture:
La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded May 7, 1718, by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha. It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of the Kingdom of France at the time. His title came from the French city of Orléans.
The French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the Treaty of Paris (1763). During the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans was an important port for smuggling aid to the rebels, transporting military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River. Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez successfully launched a southern campaign against the British from the city in 1779. New Orleans (Spanish: Nueva Orleans) remained under Spanish control until 1803, when it reverted briefly to French oversight. Nearly all of the surviving 18th-century architecture of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter) dates from the Spanish period, the most notable exception being the Old Ursuline Convent.
Napoleon sold Louisiana (New France) to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Thereafter, the city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles, and Africans. Later immigrants were Irish, Germans, and Italians. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on large plantations outside the city.
The Haitian Revolution ended in 1804 and established the second republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first republic led by Black people. It had occurred over several years in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Thousands of refugees from the revolution, both whites and free people of color (affranchis or gens de couleur libres), arrived in New Orleans, often bringing African slaves with them. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free Black men, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population. As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba also arrived. Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in retaliation for Bonapartist schemes in Spain.
Nearly 90 percent of these immigrants settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites; 3,102 free persons of African descent; and 3,226 enslaved persons of African descent, doubling the city's population. The city became 63 percent black in population, a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's 53 percent.
The Battle of New Orleans (1815)
During the final campaign of the War of 1812, the British sent a force of 11,000 soldiers, marines, and sailors, in an attempt to capture New Orleans. Despite great challenges, General Andrew Jackson, with support from the U.S. Navy on the river, successfully cobbled together a motley military force of: militia from Louisiana and Mississippi, including free men of color, U.S. Army regulars, a large contingent of Tennessee state militia, Kentucky riflemen, Choctaw fighters, and local privateers (the latter led by the pirate Jean Lafitte), to decisively defeat the British troops, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. The armies had not learned of the Treaty of Ghent which had been signed on December 24, 1814. (However, the treaty did not call for cessation of hostilities until after both governments had ratified the treaty, and the US government did not ratify it until February 16, 1815.) The fighting in Louisiana had begun in December 1814 and did not end until late January, after the Americans held off the British Navy during a ten-day siege of Fort St. Philip. (The Royal Navy went on to capture Fort Bowyer near Mobile, before the commanders received news of the peace treaty.)
As a principal port, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum era in the Atlantic slave trade. Its port also handled huge quantities of commodities for export from the interior and imported goods from other countries, which were warehoused and transferred in New Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed the length and breadth of the vast Mississippi River watershed. The river in front of the city was filled with steamboats, flatboats, and sailing ships. Despite its role in the slave trade, New Orleans at the same time had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation, who were often educated and middle-class property owners.
Dwarfing in population the other cities in the antebellum South, New Orleans had the largest slave market in the domestic slave trade, which expanded after the United States' ending of the international trade in 1808. Two-thirds of the more than one million slaves brought to the Deep South arrived via the forced migration of the domestic slave trade. The money generated by the sale of slaves in the Upper South has been estimated at 15 percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The slaves represented half a billion dollars in property. An ancillary economy grew up around the trade in slaves—for transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5 percent of the price per person. All of this amounted to tens of billions of dollars (2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) during the antebellum period, with New Orleans as a prime beneficiary.
After the Louisiana Purchase, numerous Anglo-Americans migrated to the city. The population of the city doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, New Orleans had become the wealthiest and the third-most populous city in the nation. Large numbers of German and Irish immigrants began arriving in the 1840s, working as laborers in the busy port. In this period, the state legislature passed more restrictions on manumissions of slaves, and virtually ended it in 1852.
In the 1850s, white Francophones remained an intact and vibrant community; they maintained instruction in French in two of the city's four school districts (all were white). In 1860, the city had 13,000 free people of color (gens de couleur libres), the class of free, mostly mixed-race people that developed during French and Spanish rule. The census recorded 81 percent as mulatto, a term used to cover all degrees of mixed race. Mostly part of the Francophone group, they constituted the artisan, educated and professional class of African Americans. Most blacks were still enslaved, working at the port, in domestic service, in crafts, and mostly on the many large, surrounding sugar cane plantations.
Mississippi River steamboats at New Orleans, 1853.
After growing by 45 percent in the 1850s, by 1860, the city had nearly 170,000 people The city was a destination for immigrants. It had grown in wealth, with a "per capita income [that] was second in the nation and the highest in the South." The city had a role as the "primary commercial gateway for the nation's booming mid-section." The port was the third largest in the nation in terms of tonnage of imported goods, after Boston and New York, handling 659,000 tons in 1859.
As the French Creole elite feared, during the Civil War their world changed. In 1862, following the occupation by the Navy after the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, Northern forces under Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, a respected state lawyer of the Massachusetts militia, occupied the city. Later New Orleans residents nicknamed him as "Beast" Butler, because of a military order he issued. After his troops had been assaulted and harassed in the streets by Southern women, his order warned that future such occurrences would result in his men treating such "ladies" as those "plying their avocation in the streets", implying that they would treat the women like prostitutes. Accounts of this spread like wildfire across the South and the North. He also came to be called "Spoons" Butler because of the alleged looting that his troops did while occupying New Orleans.
Butler abolished French language instruction in city schools; statewide measures in 1864 and, after the war, 1868 further strengthened English-only policy imposed by federal representatives. With the predominance of English speakers in the city and state, that language had already become dominant in business and government. By the end of the 19th century, French usage in the city had faded significantly; it was also under pressure from new immigrants: English speakers such as the Irish, and other Europeans, such as the Italians and Germans. However, as late as 1902 "one-fourth of the population of the city spoke French in ordinary daily intercourse, while another two-fourths was able to understand the language perfectly," and as late as 1945, one still encountered elderly Creole women who spoke no English. The last major French language newspaper in New Orleans, L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans Bee), ceased publication on December 27, 1923, after ninety-six years. According to some sources, Le Courrier de la Nouvelle Orleans continued until 1955.
The starving people of New Orleans under Union occupation during the Civil War, 1862
As the city was captured and occupied early in the war, it was spared the destruction through warfare suffered by many other cities of the American South. The Union Army eventually extended its control north along the Mississippi River and along the coastal areas of the State. As a result, most of the southern portion of Louisiana was originally exempted from the liberating provisions of the 1863 "Emancipation Proclamation" issued by President Abraham Lincoln. Large numbers of rural ex-slaves and some free people of color from the city volunteered for the first regiments of Black troops in the War. Led by Brig. Gen. Daniel Ullman (1810–1892), of the 78th Regiment of New York State Volunteers Militia, they were known as the "Corps d'Afrique." While that name had been used by a militia before the war, that group was composed of free people of color. The new group was made up mostly of former slaves. They were supplemented in the last two years of the War by newly organized United States Colored Troops, who played an increasingly important part in the war.
Violence throughout the South, especially the Memphis Riots of 1866 followed by the New Orleans Riot in July of that year, resulted in Congress passing the Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, to extend the protections of full citizenship to freedmen and free people of color. Louisiana and Texas were put under the authority of the "Fifth Military District" of the United States during Reconstruction. Louisiana was eventually readmitted to the Union in 1868; its Constitution of 1868 granted universal manhood suffrage and established universal public education. Both blacks and whites were elected to local and state offices. In 1872, lieutenant governor P.B.S. Pinchback, who was of mixed race, succeeded Henry Clay Warmouth for a brief period as Republican governor of Louisiana, becoming the first governor of African descent of an American state. (The next African American to serve as governor of an American state was Douglas Wilder, elected in Virginia in 1989.) New Orleans even operated a racially-integrated public school system during this period.
New Orleans Mardi Gras in the early 1890s.
Wartime damage to levees and cities along the Mississippi River adversely affected southern crops and trade for the port city for some time. The federal government contributed to restoring infrastructure, but it took time. The nationwide financial recession and Panic of 1873 also adversely affected businesses and slowed economic recovery.
From 1868, elections in Louisiana were marked by violence, as white insurgents tried to suppress black voting and disrupt Republican gatherings. Violence continued around elections. The disputed 1872 gubernatorial election resulted in conflicts that ran for years. The "White League", an insurgent paramilitary group that supported the Democratic Party, was organized in 1874 and operated in the open, violently suppressing the black vote and running off Republican officeholders. In 1874, in the Battle of Liberty Place, 5,000 members of the White League fought with city police to take over the state offices for the Democratic candidate for governor, holding them for three days. By 1876, such tactics resulted in the white Democrats, the so-called Redeemers, regaining political control of the state legislature. The federal government gave up and withdrew its troops in 1877, ending Reconstruction.
White Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, establishing racial segregation in public facilities. In 1889, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment incorporating a "grandfather clause" that effectively disfranchised freedmen as well as the propertied people of color free before the war. Unable to vote, African Americans could not serve on juries or in local office, and were closed out of formal politics for several generations in the state. It was ruled by a white Democratic Party. Public schools were racially segregated and remained so until 1960.
New Orleans' large community of well-educated, often French-speaking free persons of color (gens de couleur libres), who had been free prior to the Civil War, sought to fight back against Jim Crow. They organized the Comité des Citoyens (Citizens Committee) to work for civil rights. As part of their legal campaign, they recruited one of their own, Homer Plessy, to test whether Louisiana's newly enacted Separate Car Act was constitutional. Plessy boarded a commuter train departing New Orleans for Covington, Louisiana, sat in the car reserved for whites only, and was arrested. The case resulting from this incident, Plessy v. Ferguson, was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. The court ruled that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional, effectively upholding Jim Crow measures. In practice, African-American public schools and facilities were underfunded in Louisiana and across the South. The Supreme Court ruling contributed to this period as the nadir of race relations in the United States. The rate of lynchings of black men was high across the South, as other states also disfranchised blacks and sought to impose Jim Crow to establish white supremacy. Anti-Italian sentiment in 1891 contributed to the hanging of 11 Italians charged with murder. It was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.
Throughout New Orleans' history, until the early 20th century when medical and scientific advances ameliorated the situation, the city suffered repeated epidemics of yellow fever and other tropical and infectious diseases.
Religion:
New Orleans' colonial history of French and Spanish settlement has resulted in a strong Catholic tradition. Catholic missions administered to slaves and free people of color, establishing schools for them. In addition, many late 19th and early 20th century European immigrants, such as the Irish, some Germans, and Italians, were Catholic. In New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana Gulf Coast area, the predominant religion is Catholicism. Within the Archdiocese of New Orleans (which includes not only the city but the surrounding Parishes as well), 35.9% percent of the population is Roman Catholic.The influence of Catholicism is reflected in many of the city's French and Spanish cultural traditions, including its many parochial schools, street names, architecture, and festivals, including Mardi Gras.
New Orleans also notably has a distinctive variety of Louisiana Voodoo, due in part to syncretism with African and Afro-Caribbean Roman Catholic beliefs. The fame of the voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau contributed to this, as did New Orleans' distinctly Caribbean cultural influences. Although the tourism industry has strongly associated Voodoo with the city, only a small number of people are serious adherents to the religion.
Jewish settlers, primarily Sephardim, were part of New Orleans from the early nineteenth century. some migrated from the communities established in the colonial years in Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia. The merchant Abraham Cohen Labatt helped found the first Jewish congregation in Louisiana in the 1830s, which became known as the Portuguese Jewish Nefutzot Yehudah congregation (as he and some other members were Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors had lived in Portugal and Spain). Jews from eastern Europe came as immigrants in the late 19th and 20th centuries. By the 21st century, there were 10,000 Jews in New Orleans. This number dropped to 7,000 after the disruption of Hurricane Katrina. In the wake of Katrina, all New Orleans synagogues lost members, but most re-opened in their original locations. The exception was Congregation Beth Israel, the oldest and most prominent Orthodox synagogue in the New Orleans region. Beth Israel's building in Lakeview was destroyed by flooding. After seven years of holding services in temporary quarters, a rebuilt synagogue was consecrated in August 2012 on land purchased from its new neighbor, the Reform Congregation Gates of Prayer in Metairie.
The city has seen a recent increase in Voodoo culture and adherents with the arrival of a woman named The Swamp Queen by local residents. Though the so called swamp queen is no adherent to Voodoo, good luck telling local residents that. The rumored appearance of undead at her swamp plantation have fueled most of the fire. Cults of Voodoo have sprung up in dark places around the city where people who barely understand the powers they are attempting to control have created a resurgence in the practice of the old religion. Rumors suggest some prominent members of the city have joined the cults, though no positive proof has ever been found. What has long been a curiosity tapped for tourism purposes has now created a dark underbelly where crime lords and politicians are rumored to intermingle.
Crime and Passion:
New Orleans has begun to slide into darkness, it's not visible on the surface but as criminal lords moved out of Grimm City once it was brought back under the heel of the US government some of them moved into New Orleans. Here they have found purchase in the dark and increasing world of the Voodoo cults where they twist an old religion for their own purposes and use the cults not as a place to practice beliefs, but as a place to meet people of influence, work with one another and create deals with corrupt politicians...or create corrupt politicians with blackmail.
In a city as diverse and varied as New Orleans, such activities become lost in the woodwork. While crime and corruption are on the rise they have not yet begun to threaten the stability of the city itself. The nightlife of New Orleans remains a thriving industry in its own right and is the mingling center of the city's elite and powerful. Those who wish to ingratiate themselves with the important members of the city must do so first by attending the many parties of the wealthy where a unique combination of Southern Class and New Orleans Culture combine in vast parties hosted in the oldest buildings in the city.
Attendance to one of these parties is by invitation only and invitations are issued as each new party is planned out. Those who are left off are cut out from some of the most important circles in the city while those who are invited have access to everyone from Mayors and City Council members to State Senators, the ultra wealthy movers and shakers of the city and people of significant standing. Invitations to the parties can be solicited if someone knows a person who is already invited or otherwise included in the party (such as a planner). It is seen as poor form to offer money in exchange for an invitation but it has been known to work on occasion. All of these parties are costume parties and all costumes must involve a mask of some form.
The increase in crime in the city has initially occurred in the districts hit hardest by Katrina where there are more abandoned buildings and houses and where economic recovery remains slow. Police presence has been stretched thin, resulting in the development of New Orleans style vigilantes, most of whom are local people with some skill and perhaps a meta human ability or two.
The Voodoo Cult:
Traditional practitioners of Voodoo have been forced out of their own scene by an increase in meta-human and corrupt members of society joining what has rapidly become an underground cult. There are two kinds of Voodoo cultist, the ones who can wield voodoo powers as an actual ability...and the ones who think they should burn the bones of their chicken. The vast majority of cultists are people who want access to power, many of them are poorer than those who can attend the big parties of the elite but others are criminal lords, secret evil doers and other such undesirables. These people only loosely practice the religion they ascribe to but will often use it as a threat to the uneducated, perhaps along with a few parlor tricks to compound the threat.
The other portion of Voodoo cultists is much smaller but far more power in a true, physical (or in this case meta-physical) sense. Voodoo powers vary significantly and are often labeled by others as simply another name for magic. Of those who practice Voodoo in New Orleans the most powerful is Lady Dominque, a heavily french accented woman of slave descent who is deeply feared by even the most powerful individuals in the city. Crime lords and corrupt politicians alike sometimes seek an audience with her in hopes she might use some fraction of her power to improve their prospects. Though it is said she has sometimes helped such people, she has never chosen a side in any of the underworld's conflicts and steadfastly refuses to do so. All Voodoo Cultists in the city refer to Lady Dominque as the ultimate expert and highest authority figure in their religion...though many are those who wield her name to sound frightening, few are those who have actually met with her.
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OC:
Usual rules apply.
Lady Dominique is NOT an NPC, do not treat her as such. If you wish to speak with her, contact me and we will work something out.
Vael is known in the city, a character wishing to speak with her can find the location of her Plantation by speaking to anyone of influence in New Orleans, especially those in the Voodoo Cult.
Please feel free to flesh out the city further with the creation of sub-locations.
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