Home · States · Louisiana · History
LALouisiana History
Louisiana is divided into 64 parishes rather than counties, and its judges decide civil cases under a code descended from French and Spanish law instead of English common law. By the time the United States took possession in December 1803, the colony had been governed for 120 years from Versailles and Madrid, and the people living along the river had no intention of starting over in English.
Poverty Point, the Caddo and the Chitimacha
The state's oldest monument stands in West Carroll Parish. Between roughly 1700 and 1100 BC, people at Poverty Point raised six concentric earthen ridges and a large mound basket by basket, without farming or draft animals, trading for stone from as far as the Great Lakes. UNESCO listed it as World Heritage in 2014.
At European contact the Caddo held the northwest, the Natchez the bluffs upriver, and the Tunica the lower Mississippi valley. The Atakapa lived on the southwestern prairies, the Houma along the bayous, and the Chitimacha in the Atchafalaya basin and along Bayou Teche. The Chitimacha fought France for a dozen years after 1706 and were nearly destroyed for it, yet they still hold the only federal reservation in Louisiana, on part of their original ground.
La Louisiane under three flags
René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi on April 9, 1682, claimed the entire watershed for Louis XIV, and named it Louisiane. Natchitoches, founded in 1714, is the oldest permanent settlement anywhere in the territory the United States later bought. Bienville laid out New Orleans in 1718, and the capital moved there in 1722, the year a hurricane knocked most of it down. John Law's Company of the Indies ran the colony through the speculative mania of 1717 to 1720, shipping in colonists and enslaved Africans on promises that collapsed. The Code Noir was applied in 1724, and after the Natchez destroyed Fort Rosalie in 1729, France destroyed the Natchez in reply.
| Year | Change of sovereignty |
|---|---|
| 1682 | La Salle claims the Mississippi valley for France |
| 1762 | France secretly cedes New Orleans and the west bank to Spain |
| 1763 | Britain takes everything east of the river except the Isle of Orleans |
| 1800 | Spain returns the colony to France at San Ildefonso |
| 1803 | Napoleon sells it; flag change in New Orleans, December 20 |
New Orleans merchants ran off the first Spanish governor in 1768, and Alejandro O'Reilly came back the next year with troops and executed five of the ringleaders. Acadian families expelled from Nova Scotia between 1755 and 1764 were resettled along the bayous and prairies, becoming the Cajuns. Fires in 1788 and 1794 burned most of the old French town, so the French Quarter that tourists photograph today is Spanish colonial architecture with courtyards and iron galleries.
Bought in 1803, a state by 1812
Napoleon meant Louisiana to feed his Caribbean sugar islands. The Haitian Revolution destroyed the army sent to retake Saint-Domingue, and he sold the territory instead. Congress created the Territory of Orleans in 1804. In 1809 about nine thousand refugees from Saint-Domingue arrived by way of Cuba, white, free Black and enslaved in near equal thirds, roughly doubling the population of New Orleans.
In January 1811 several hundred enslaved people led by Charles Deslondes marched down the river road from the German Coast toward New Orleans in the largest slave revolt in United States history. Militia and planters crushed it in two days and displayed severed heads along the levee. Statehood came on April 30, 1812, nine years to the day after the purchase treaty was signed, making Louisiana the eighteenth state and the first one carved out of the Purchase. Andrew Jackson beat British regulars at Chalmette on January 8, 1815, two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent had already ended the war.
Sugar, secession, and a Reconstruction first
Étienne de Boré granulated sugar commercially in 1795 on the plantation that is now Audubon Park, and sugar and cotton made fortunes on the labor of the enslaved. New Orleans held the largest slave market in the country and by 1840 was among the biggest American cities and busiest ports. Louisiana seceded on January 26, 1861, and lost its most valuable asset almost immediately. David Farragut's fleet ran the forts below the city and New Orleans surrendered on April 25, 1862, the first major Confederate city captured and occupied for the rest of the war under Benjamin Butler, whose General Order No. 28 drew protest as far as London. Port Hudson upriver held out from May 22 to July 9, 1863, the longest siege in American military history, and the Louisiana Native Guards, free Black regiments from New Orleans, assaulted its works on May 27.
Reconstruction went further here than almost anywhere and was reversed with more violence. P.B.S. Pinchback served 35 days as acting governor from December 1872, the first Black governor of any state. White paramilitary groups answered with the Colfax massacre on Easter Sunday 1873 and the Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans in 1874. In 1892 a New Orleans citizens committee arranged for Homer Plessy, a Creole shoemaker, to be arrested on a whites-only railcar to test the segregation law, and the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson made separate but equal national law for 58 years. The state constitution of 1898 added a grandfather clause, and Black voter registration fell from about 130,000 to roughly 1,300 within eight years.
Huey Long, oil, and a coast going under
The first Louisiana oil well came in near Jennings in 1901, and the industry moved from marsh to water: the first well drilled out of sight of land was completed off Terrebonne Parish in 1947. In April 1927 the Mississippi rose past every levee, and to relieve pressure on New Orleans authorities dynamited the levee at Caernarvon on April 29, deliberately flooding St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Compensation promised to those flooded out mostly never came, and the disaster pushed tens of thousands of Black Louisianians north.
Huey Long became governor in 1928 promising roads, bridges, free schoolbooks and a share of the oil money, delivered much of it, ran the state like a machine from the Senate afterward, and was shot in the capitol he had built in Baton Rouge on September 8, 1935. He died two days later. Hurricane Betsy flooded the Lower Ninth Ward in 1965 and produced the federal levee system that failed on August 29, 2005, when Katrina's surge broke the canal walls, put roughly 80 percent of New Orleans under water and killed more than 1,300 people in Louisiana. The delta itself is going too. Levees and navigation canals cut off the sediment that built the marsh, and Louisiana has lost around 2,000 square miles of coastal land since the 1930s.
Purchase states in the daily grid
Statedoku uses the Louisiana Purchase as a puzzle constraint. Fifteen states came wholly or partly out of that one 1803 treaty.
Play today's puzzle →More Louisiana, and the neighbours
Frequently asked questions
When did Louisiana become a state?
April 30, 1812, as the eighteenth state, exactly nine years after the Louisiana Purchase treaty was signed. It was the first state created out of the Purchase territory, formed from the Territory of Orleans.
Why does Louisiana have parishes instead of counties?
Under French and Spanish rule the colony was divided into church parishes, which doubled as civil districts. When the territorial legislature organized local government in 1807 it kept those boundaries and the word, and the state constitution has used parish ever since. Louisiana has 64 of them.
Who controlled Louisiana before the United States?
France claimed it in 1682 and ruled until 1762, when it secretly ceded New Orleans and the west bank to Spain. Spain governed from 1769 until the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso returned the colony to France in 1800. France held it only briefly before selling it to the United States in 1803.
What happened to New Orleans during the Civil War?
Union ships under David Farragut passed the forts below the city and New Orleans surrendered on April 25, 1862, barely a year into the war. It was the largest Confederate city and was occupied for the rest of the conflict, first under General Benjamin Butler, whose harsh orders drew international protest.
Why is Louisiana losing land along the coast?
The delta was built by Mississippi River sediment spreading across the marsh during floods. Levees now send that sediment off the continental shelf, navigation and oil canals let saltwater into freshwater wetlands, and the ground is subsiding while the sea rises. Louisiana has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of coastal land since the 1930s.