Introducing Wikipedia Louisiana

            Over the history of this blog, we’ve tried to educate our readers about Louisiana’s unique history. It’s a land of Cajuns and Creoles, crawfish and king cake, and Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima. We’ve explored the history of Mardi Gras, Christmas Eve bonfires, and the Natchitoches Meat Pie.  We’ve written way too many words about the New Orleans Saints. We’ve reviewed New Orleans restaurants and local attractions.  

            Since this is a blog as much about the State of Louisiana as anything else, we’re excited to launch a new recurring feature—Wikipedia Louisiana.  We’re going to use the popular online encyclopedia to highlight the unique features of our home state. So let us explain how this is going to work.  We’ll begin our adventure on the Wikipedia page for the State of Louisiana. Then we will highlight some feature of that page. For the next feature, we’ll follow some link off the Louisiana Wikipedia page to shed some light on some other part of Louisiana. Then the following week, we’ll follow a link from each subsequent page. This way we can explore some of the more interesting and less well-known parts of Louisiana’s culture and history. 

The Louisiana Purchase overlaid the modern US 

            For this week, let’s just start off with how Louisiana became a state through the Louisiana Purchase.  Louisiana became the 18^thstate on April 30, 1812. In 1803, the United States had purchased the then Louisiana Territory from the French government of Napoleon Bonaparte for approximately $15 million (equivalent to about $300 million in today’s money). The Louisiana territory included land would become parts of 15 states: Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado and parts of two Canadian provinces: Alberta and Saskatchewan.  The land purchase was the largest in the history of the young United States. 

Louisiana becomes American 

President Thomas Jefferson had initially wanted to purchase the port of New Orleans and not the entire territory. As a desire for cotton and other slave-grown agricultural products fueled westward settlement, Jefferson and other southerners wanted guaranteed access for their goods down the Mississippi River. The only way to guarantee that access came by controlling the city of New Orleans itself. New Orleans sat near the mouth of the Mississippi river and any ships passing out into the gulf or up the Mississippi had to stop off in New Orleans. The city had long been a hub of trade since the French founded the city in the early 17^thcentury. Jefferson wrote of his desire to control New Orleans that: 

There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants. France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for years. Her pacific dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us, and it would not perhaps be very long before some circumstance might arise which might make the cession of it to us the price of something of more worth to her. Not so can it ever be in the hands of France. 

Napoleon proved more than willing to sell not only New Orleans, but the entire territory. The diminutive French dictator had little interest in reviving French claims to North America and had more pressing concerns fighting wars against his European neighbors.  

            Since Louisiana was originally a French colony, its state government varied significantly from the other American states. Next week we’ll explore this phenomenon.