HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/anarchy/essays/schoolsucks/preneworl.txt

Text File | 1996-04-27 | 17KB | 185 lines

History
Pre-Civil War New Orleans

    New Orleans is a city in southern Louisiana, located on the Mississippi River. Most of the city is
situated on the east bank, between the river and Lake Pontchartrain to the north. Because it was built on a
great turn of the river, it is known as the Crescent City. New Orleans, with a population of 496,938 (1990
census), is the largest city in Louisiana and one of the principal cities of the South. It was established on
the high ground nearest the mouth of the Mississippi, which is 177 km (110 mi) downstream. Elevations
range from 3.65 m (12 ft) above sea level to 2 m (6.5 ft) below; as a result, an ingenious system of water
pumps, drainage canals, and levees has been built to protect the city from flooding.
New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, and named for the
regent of France, Philippe II, duc d'Orleans. It remained a French colony until 1763, when it was
transferred to the Spanish. In 1800, Spain ceded it back to France; in 1803, New Orleans, along with the
entire Louisiana Purchase, was sold by Napoleon I to the United States. It was the site of the Battle of New
Orleans (1815) in the War of 1812. During the Civil War the city was besieged by Union ships under
Adm. David Farragut; it fell on Apr. 25, 1862.
    And that's what it say's in the books, a bit more, but nothing else of interest.  This is too bad,
New Orleans , as a city, has a wide and diverse history that reads as if it were a utopian society built to
survive the troubles of the future.  New Orleans is a place where Africans, Indians and European settlers
shared their cultures and intermingled.  Encouraged by the French government, this strategy for
producing a durable culture in a difficult place marked New Orleans as different and special from its
inception and continues to distinguish the city today.
    Like the early American settlements along Massachusetts Bay and Chesapeake Bay, New Orleans
served as a distinctive cultural gateway to North America, where peoples from Europe and Africa initially
intertwined their lives and customs with those of the native inhabitants of the New World. The resulting
way of life differed dramatically from the culture than was spawned in the English colonies of North
America. New Orleans Creole population (those with ancestry rooted in the city's colonial era) ensured not
only that English was not the prevailing language but also that Protestantism was scorned, public
education unheralded, and democratic government untried.   Isolation helped to nourish the differences.
From its founding in 1718 until the early nineteenth century, New Orleans remained far removed from the
patterns of living in early Massachusetts or Virginia.  Established a century after those seminal Anglo-
Saxon places, it remained for the next hundred years an outpost for the French and Spanish until
Napoleon sold it to the United States with the rest of the Louisiana purchase in 1803.
    Even though steamboats and sailing ships connected French Louisiana to the rest of the country,
New Orleans guarded its own way of life. True, it became Dixie's chief cotton and slave market, but it
always remained a strange place in the American South. American newcomers from the South as well as
the North recoiled when they encountered the prevailing French language of the city, its dominant
Catholicism, its bawdy sensual delights, or its proud free black and slave inhabitants;  In short, its deeply
rooted Creole population and their peculiar traditions.  Rapid influxes of non-southern population
compounded the peculiarity of its Creole past.  Until the mid-nineteenth century, a greater number of
migrants arrived in the boomtown from northern states such as New York and Pennsylvania than from the
Old South. And to complicate its social makeup further, more foreign immigrants than Americans came
to take up residence in the city almost to the beginning of the twentieth century.
    The largest waves of immigrants came from Ireland and Germany. In certain neighborhoods,
their descendants' dialects would make visitors feel like they were back in Brooklyn or Chicago. From
1820 to 1870, the Irish and Germans made New Orleans one of the main immigration ports in the nation,
second only to New York, but ahead of Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.  New Orleans also was the
first city in America to host a significant settlement of Italians, Greeks, Croatians, and Filipinos.
THE AFRICANS:
    African Americans compile about half  of the city of New Orleans population to date.  How did
this come about?  Well, during the eighteenth century, Africans came to the city directly from West
Africa. The majority passed neither through the West Indies nor South America, so they developed
complicated relations with both the Indian and Europeans.  Their descendants born in the colony were
also called Creoles. The Spanish rulers (1765-1802) reached out to the black population for support
against the French settlers; in doing so, they allowed many to buy their own freedom.  These free black
settlers along with Creole slaves formed the earliest black urban settlement in North America. Black
American immigrants found them to be quite exotic, for the black Creoles were Catholic, French or
Creole speakers, and accustomed to an entirely different lifestyle.
    The native Creole population and the American newcomers resolved some of their conflicts by
living in different areas of the city.  Eventually, the Americans concentrated their numbers in new uptown
neighborhoods.  For a certain period (1836-1852), they even ran separate municipal governments to avoid
severe political, economic, and cultural clashes.  Evidence of this early cleavage still survives in the city's
oldest quarters.
    During the infamous Atlantic slave trade, thousands of Muslims from the Senegambia and Sudan
were kidnapped or captured in local wars and sold into slavery.   In America, these same Muslims
converted other Africans and Amerindians to Islam.  As the great Port of New Orleans was a major point
of entry for merchant ships, holds bursting with human, African cargo, the Port was also, unbeknownst to
many, a major point of entry for captured Muslims (most often prisoners of local wars) who certainly
brought with them their only possession unable to be stripped from them by their captors, their religion,
Islamic.
    The historical record of shipping manifests attests to the fact that the majority of slaving
merchant vessels that deposited their goods at the mouth of the Mississippi took on their cargoes from
those areas of West Africa with significant Muslim population.  As the Islamic belief system forbids
suicide and encourages patient perseverance, the middle-passage survival rate of captured African
Muslims was quite high.  For example, one such courageous survivor was Ibrahima Abdur Rahman, son
of the king of the Fulani people of the Senegambia region, named "The Prince" by his master Thomas
Foster of Natchez, Mississippi. Abdur Rahman came through the Port of New Orleans, was sold at auction
and became a man of renown on the Foster Plantation. He eventually petitioned his freedom via President
John Quincy Adams and returned to Africa after 46 years of enslavement.
    Free People of Color (f.p.c.) were Africans, Creoles of Color (New World-Born People of African
descent), and persons of mixed African, European, and or Native American descent.  In Louisiana, the
first f.p.c. came from France or its Colonies in the Caribbean and in West Africa. During the French
Colonial period in Louisiana, f.p.c. were a rather small and insignificant group.  During French rule from
1702-1769, there are records for only 150 emancipations of slaves. The majority of slaves freed in
Louisiana's Colonial period was during the Spanish reign from 1769-1803, with approximately 2,500
slaves being freed.
The majority of these slaves were Africans and unmixed Blacks who bought their freedom. Later on this
initial group would be augmented by Haitian refugees and other f.p.c. from the Caribbean, Mexico,
Central and South America, other parts of the United States, and from around the world.
    Besides self-purchase and donation of freedom, slaves sometimes earned freedom for meritorious
service in battle or saving the life of their masters. A significant amount of slaves became free because
they were the children of white native born and European fathers who sometimes openly acknowledged
their mixed offspring and who also usually freed the mother of their children.  It would be several
generations before mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon women would become the common-law wives and
mistresses of white men.
The reason for the high number of f.p.c. in New Orleans was largely due to the influx of Haitian Refugees
into the city in 1809. Approximately 10,000 people arrived in New Orleans with roughly a third being
f.p.c., another third slaves, and the remaining were white.  By the eve of the Civil War in 1860,  the
reported total population for f.p.c. in Louisiana was 18,647 people with the majority being in New Orleans
with a census tally of 10,689 people.
    Free People of Color were highly skilled craftsmen, business people, educators, writers, planters,
and musicians. Many free women of color were highly skilled seamstresses, hairdressers, and cooks while
some owned property and kept boarding houses. Some f.p.c. were planters before and after the Civil War
and owned slaves. Although shocking and incomprehensible to many people today, the fact that some
f.p.c. owned slaves must come to light.
CROLEAN SOCIETY:
    In eighteenth century Louisiana, the term Creole referred to locally born persons, regardless of
status or race, and was used to distinguish American-born slaves from African-born slaves when they
testified in court and on inventory lists of slaves.  They were identified simply as Creoles if they were
locally born, or Creoles of another region or colony if they had been born elsewhere in the Americas of
non-American ancestry, whether African or European. However, due to the racial and cultural complexity
of colonial Louisiana, native Americans who were born into slavery were sometimes described as
"Creoles" or "born in country."
    After the United States took over Louisiana, the Creole cultural identity became a means of
distinguishing who was truly native to Louisiana from those that were Anglo.  Creole has to come mean
the language and folk culture which native to the southern part of Louisiana where African,  French, and
Spanish influence were most deeply rooted historically and culturally.
    The language too,  represents these traits, whereas  the vocabulary of Louisiana Creole is
overwhelmingly French in origin, its grammatical structure is largely African.  The early creation of the
Louisiana Creole language and its widespread use among whites as well as blacks up until World War II
is strong evidence for the strength of the African ingredient in Louisiana Creole culture. The widespread
survival of Louisiana Creole until very recent times and its use by whites of various social positions as
well as by blacks and mixed-bloods had, no doubt, a great impact upon Africanizing Louisiana culture.
The Louisiana Creole language became an important part of the identity, not only of African-Creoles, but
of many whites of all classes who, seduced by its rhythm, intoxicating accent, humor and imagination,
adopted it as their preferred means of communication. There is still a significant number of whites who
only speak Louisiana Creole.
MARDI GRAS:
    Many locals begin with a party on January 6 that includes a King Cake, a cake baked in the
shape of a large doughnut, covered with icing and colored sugar of green, gold, and purple, the traditional
Mardi Gras colors. Purple represents justice, green representing faith, and gold representing power. Inside
the cake is a tiny plastic baby, meant to represent the Baby Jesus.  Whoever gets the piece with the baby is
crowned King or Queen ... and is expected to throw a party on the following weekend. Parties with King
Cake continue each weekend until Mardi Gras itself finally arrives.
    The name Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday in French. The day is known as Fat Tuesday, since it is
the last day before Lent. Lent is the season of prayer and fasting observed by the Roman Catholic Church
and other Christian denominations during the forty days and seven Sundays before Easter Sunday.   Easter
can be on any Sunday from March 23 to April 25, since the exact day is set to coincide with the first
Sunday after the full moon following the Spring Equinox. Mardi Gras occurs on any Tuesday from
February 3 through March 9.  The Gregorian calendar, setup by the Catholic Church, determines the exact
day for Mardi Gras.
    The celebration started in New Orleans around the seventeenth century, when Jean Baptiste
LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, and Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur de Iberville founded the city.  In 1699, the group
set up camp 60 miles south of the present location of New Orleans on the river's West Bank. They named
the site Point du Mardi Gras in recognition of the major French holiday happening on that day, March 3.
The late 1700's, saw pre-Lenten balls and fetes in the infant New Orleans.  The masked balls continued
until the Spanish government took over and banned the events.  The ban even continued after New
Orleans became an American city in 1803.  Eventually, the predominant Creole population revitalized the
balls by 1823. Within the next four years, street masking was legalized.
But it must be remembered that although costumes are worn for both, Mardi Gras is not Halloween. Gore
and mayhem may work for All Hallow's Eve, but for Mardi Gras, glamour is de rigour. Feathers, beads,
glitter, spangles -- all work well on Mardi Gras. Tuxedoes, ball gowns, and boas work. Fake blood and
Freddie Krueger gloves do not.
    The early Mardi Gras consisted of citizens wearing masks on foot, in carriages, and on
horseback. The first documented parade in 1837 was made of a costumed revelers. The Carnival season
eventually became so wild that the authorities banned street masking by the late 1830's. This was an
attempt to control the civil disorder arising from this annual celebration.
    This ban didn't stop the hard core celebrators. By the 1840's, a strong desire to ban all public
celebrations was growing.  Luckly, six young men from Mobile saved Mardi Gras. These men had been
members of the Cowbellians, a group that performed New Years Eve parades in Mobile since 1831. The
six men established the Mystick Krewe of Comus, which put together the first New Orleans Carnival
parade on the evening of Mardi Gras in 1857. The parade consisted of two mule-driven floats. This
promoted others to join in on this new addition to Mardi Gras. Unfortunately, the Civil War caused the
celebration to loose some of its magic and public observance. The magic returned along with several other
new krewes after the war.
    Rituals and traditions have also evolved with non-krewe members as well. Those in the heart of
Carnival often begin their celebrating on January 6, and don't let up until Ash Wednesday , remember,
Mardi Gras is the peak of the Carnival Season, but it 's only one day. Therefore,  New Orleans has
officially established Lundi Gras on the Monday before Fat Tuesday because no one can get any work
done as of the Friday before anyway.
NEAT FACT:
    Senegambia, where I noted earlier that a lot of the original blacks had come from,  had long been
a crossroads of the world where peoples and cultures were assimilated in warfare and the rise and fall of
great empires.   An essential feature of the cultural materials brought from Senegambia as well as from
other parts of Africa was a willingness to add and incorporate useful aspects of new cultures encountered.
This attitude was highly functional in a dangerous and chaotic world. New Orleans became another
crossroads where the river, the bayous and the sea were open roads; where various nations ruled but the
folk continued to reign. They turned inhospitable swamplands into a refuge for the independent, the
defiant, and the creative "unimportant" people who tore down all the barriers of language and culture
among peoples throughout the world and continue to sing to them of joy and the triumph of the human
spirit.Put your paper here.