Swathed in the romance of pirates, voodoo and Mardi Gras,
LOUISIANA is undeniably special. Its history is barely on
nodding terms with the view that America was the creation of the
Pilgrim Fathers; its way of life is proudly set apart. This is the
land of the rural, French-speaking Cajuns (descended from
the Acadians, eighteenth-century French-Canadian refugees), who
live in the prairies and swamps in the southwest of the state, and
the Creoles of jazzy, sassy New Orleans . (The term
Creole was originally used to define anyone born in the
state to French or Spanish colonists - famed in the nineteenth
century for their masked balls, family feuds and duels - as well as
native-born, French-speaking slaves, but has since come to define
anyone or anything native to Louisiana, and in particular its black
population.) Louisiana's spicy home-cooked food , regular
festivals and lilting French-based dialect - and above all
its music ( jazz, R&B, Cajun and its bluesy black
counterpart, zydeco) - draw from all these cultures. Oddly enough,
north Louisiana - Protestant Bible Belt country, where old
plantation homes stand decaying in vast cottonfields - feels more
"Southern" than the marshy bayous, shaded by ancient cypress trees
and laced with wispy trails of Spanish moss, of the Catholic south
of the state.
The French first settled Louisiana in 1682, braving
swamps and plagues to harvest the abundant cypress, but the state
was sparsely inhabited before its first permanent settlement, the
trading post of Natchitoches , was established in 1714. In
1760, Louis XV secretly handed New Orleans, along with all French
territory west of the Mississippi, to his Spanish cousin,
Charles III, as a safeguard against the British. Louisiana remained
Spanish until it was ceded to Napoleon in 1801, under the proviso
that it should never change hands again. Just two years later,
however, Napoleon, strapped for cash to fund his battles with the
British in Europe, struck a bargain with president Thomas Jefferson
known as the Louisiana Purchase . This sneaky agreement
handed over to the US all French lands between Canada and Mexico,
from the Mississippi to the Rockies, for a total cost of $15
million. The subsequent "Americanization" of Louisiana was one of
the most momentous periods in the state's history, with the port of
New Orleans, in its key position near the mouth of the
Mississippi River , growing to become one of the nation's
wealthiest cities. Though the state seceded from the Union to join
the Confederacy in 1861, there were important differences between
Louisiana and the rest of the slave-driven South. The Black
Code , drawn up by the French in 1685 to govern Saint-Domingue
(today's Haiti) and established in Louisiana in 1724, had given
slaves rights unparalleled elsewhere, including permission to
marry, meet socially and take Sundays off. The black population of
New Orleans in particular was renowned as exceptionally literate
and cosmopolitan.
Though Louisiana was not physically scarred by the Civil War,
with few important battles fought on its soil, its economy was
ravaged, and its social structures all but destroyed. The
Reconstruction era, too, hit particularly hard here, with
the once great city of New Orleans suffering a period of
unprecedented lawlessness and racial violence. In time the economy,
at least, recovered, benefiting from the key importance of the
mighty Mississippi River and the discovery of offshore oil, but
over the last century Louisiana has come to rely more and more
heavily upon tourism , centered around New Orleans and Cajun
country. And it's not hard to see why: whether canoeing along a
moss-tangled bayou, dining in a crumbling Creole cottage on spicy,
buttery crawfish, or dancing on a steamy starlit night to the best
live music in the world, few visitors fail to fall in love with
Louisiana.