A little later we have the New Orleans of 1723.  It is a low swamp, overgrown with ragged forests, and cut up into a thousand islands by ruts and pools of stagnant water.  There is a small cleared space along the river’s channel but even this being only partly reclaimed from the surrounding marsh, is often inundated.  It is cut up into square patches, round each of which runs a ditch of black mud and refuse, which, lying exposed to the rays of an almost tropical sun, sends forth unwholesome odors, and invites pestilence.

There is a palisade around the city, and a great moat; and here, with the tall, green grasses growing up to their humble doors, live graceful ladies and noble gentlemen, representatives of that nation so famed for finesse of manner and stately grace.  It is an odd picture this rough doorway, surrounded with reeds and swamps, mud and misery, and crowned with the beauty of a fair French maiden, who steps daintily, with Parisian ease, upon the highway of the new world.

She is not, however, alone in her exile.  Along the banks of the Mississippi, for miles beyond the city, stretch the fertile plantations of the representatives of aristocratic French families.  The rich lands are worked by negro slaves, who, fresh from the African coast, walk erect before their masters, being strangers to the abject, crouching gait which a century of slavery afterwards imposes upon them.  No worship save the Catholic is allowed, and to remind the people of their duty wooden crosses are erected on every side.

The next picture of New Orleans is in 1792.  It has passed into other hands now, for the king of France has ceded it, with the territory of Louisiana, to his cousin of Spain, and has in fact, with a single stroke of the pen, stripped himself of possessions extending from the mouth of the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence.  The type of civilization is now changed, and we see things moving in the iron groove of Spanish bigotry.  The very architecture changes with the new rule, and the houses seem grim and fortress-like, while the cadaverous-cheeked Spaniard stands in the gloom with his hand upon his sword, one of the six thousand souls now within this ill-drained city.  Successive Spanish governors hold their sway under the Spanish king; and then the Spaniard goes his way.

Spanish civilization cannot take so firm a hold in New Orleans as the French, and many privately pray for the old banner, until at last France herself determines to again possess her old territory.  Spain, knowing opposition to be useless, and heartily sick of this distant colony, so hard to govern and so near the quarrelsome Americans, who seem ready to fulfil their threat of taking New Orleans by force if their commercial interests are interfered with, yields a ready assent.  The city becomes the property of Napoleon the Great; but hardly have the papers been signed, when, in 1803, it is ceded to the United States.  Half a generation later the conflicting national elements are settled into something like harmony, and the state of Louisiana has a population of fifty thousand souls.