Neither Wet nor Dry, Black nor White: New Orleans and the Mississippi River

As a teenage riverboat pilot in the 1850s, Mark Twain learned how to interpret the Mississippi, "whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking." Avoiding submerged logs and shoals, watching for signs of the water rising or falling, recognizing changes in the river's course as great bends were cut off in storms, he also witnessed annual floods that could transform it into something like a slow-moving lake, fifty miles wide. He saw lonely squatter families huddled on makeshift rafts, shaking with malaria and waiting for the waters to subside. These floods came "from the December rise out of the Ohio and the June rise out of the Mississippi." They were a short-term curse, threatening lives, animals, and buildings, but a long-term blessing, since the silt they left behind created some of the richest farmland in the world. Besides, as Twain wrote of the squatters, the floods "at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by."

The southern terminus of Twain's journeys was New Orleans, a city that fascinated him and where he once attended a cockfight, in the presence of "men and boys of all ages and all colors, and of many languages and nationalities." Lawrence Powell's Accidental City tells the story of this polyglot place from its founding in 1718 to the American takeover in 1803. It is a labor of love. Powell, a professor at Tulane University, is interested in every aspect of New Orleans' history and shows as much zeal for clothes, food, religion, and music as for the city's role in eighteenth-century politics. It was a place where people of all classes and races mingled, reinventing themselves, adapting European principles to a New World reality while scrambling for wealth, influence, and status. It was also a place where dishonesty thrived.

His title refers to the fact that the siting of New Orleans had more to do with French entrepreneurs' competing land claims than with geographical logic. The site "was dreadful. It was prone to flooding and infested with snakes and mosquitoes. Hurricanes battered it regularly. Pestilence visited the town almost as often" (p. 2). It has presented public health and safety challenges ever since, with high mortality rates and, in the eighteenth century, devastating fires in its closely packed wooden structures. Its founders promoted the idea of New Orleans as the heart of a great new empire and attracted hundreds of credulous investors between 1717 and 1721. Then the bubble burst, ruining a generation of Parisian financiers and leaving no more than a tenuous settlement in the fever swamps.

Although sited on the mainland and destined, eventually, to become part of the United States, eighteenth-century New Orleans is best understood, says Powell, as a Caribbean city, to be considered beside the cities of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola—the sugar islands over which Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands fought continually. It had a small trade from fur trappers upstream, and it struggled to develop a tobacco industry to rival Britain's Chesapeake colonies, but its real significance was as a smuggling port. French mercantilist laws specified that only French vessels could trade there. Commercial realities created enormous incentives to ignore or sidestep those laws, and nearly everybody, government officials included, did so.

Spain took over New Orleans from France at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1762. The first Spanish governor took three years to materialize, and the city was never really Hispanicized. A handful of influential French merchants, many of whom...