Crescent City Burndown

French New Orleans, born a rough riverside outpost in 1718, died on Good Friday seven decades later. The settlement had come under Spanish administration in 1769, and the local paymaster, Vicente Nunez, had in honor of the holiday lit altar candles in his home. While Nunez went off to have dinner, the candles ignited his ceiling, and high winds spread the flames from roof to roof. By late afternoon New Orleans lay in ashes. Eighty percent of the inhabitants’ houses had burned down. The hospital and Ursuline convent survived the fire, but most public buildings did not. It had been a mournful day indeed.

French Quarter, Sept. 2013. Photo by author.

The colonists, free and enslaved, rebuilt the town, which occupied too important a location for abandonment. Where possible they rebuilt in brick and stone, in conformity to a new urban fire code. When feasible they rebuilt in the Spanish Baroque style: buildings now featured distinctive iron-railed balconies and interior courtyards, after the fashion of other contemporary Spanish administrative centers. New Orleans now more resembled Havana or Santiago than Montreal.      

New Orleans’s 1788 fire also initiated the community’s Americanization, or rather its integration into the economy of the United States. The port had suffered from supply problems throughout the 1780s, and the conflagration destroyed nearly all of the warehouses. Governor Esteban Miro ordered flour from Philadelphia, and American territorial governor Arthur St. Clair offered to ship food downriver from the Ohio country. While Spain’s minister plenipotentiary politely declined St. Clair’s offer (he claimed that Spanish merchants had already “glutted up the [provisions] market”), in subsequent years Miro allowed at least some riverine shipping into New Orleans. Spanish regulations barred American farmers from using the Mississippi River, but the Orleannais’s need for cheap food and timber remained too great. By the turn of the century New Orleans retained a French name but was full of Spanish architecture, American goods, and a large African-descended population. It is always easier to think of cities as monocultural, but much of the Crescent City’s unique identify comes instead from its contingent, disaster-ridden history and the blending of cultures that resulted.

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Sources: Primary inspiration comes from this short narrative by Cindy Ermus. See also her article “Reduced to Ashes: The Good Friday Fire in Spanish Colonial New Orleans,” Louisiana History 54 (Summer 2013): 292-331; Arthur St. Clair to Diego Gardoqui, 16 July 1788, in W.H. Smith, Arthur St Clair Papers (Clarke and Co., 1882), 2: 59-60 (quote); David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale UP, 1992), 207; Kevin Barksdale, “The New Orleans Fire of 1788 and the Transformation of Iberian-American Relations in the West,” paper presented at the 77th Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Baltimore, 30 Oct. 2011.