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In the 1850s, a startling new political party appeared on the American scene. Both its members and its critics called the new party by various names, but to most it was known as the Know Nothing Party. It reignited political fires over nativism and anti-immigration sentiments. At a time of political uncertainty, with the Whig party on the verge of collapse, the Know Nothings seemed destined to replace them and perhaps become a political fixture. Historian Marius M. Carriere Jr. tracks the rise and fall of the Know Nothing movement in Louisiana, outlining not only the history of the party as it is usually known, but also explaining how the party's unique permeation in Louisiana contrasted with the Know Nothings' expansion nationally and elsewhere in the South. For example, many Roman Catholics in the state joined the Know Nothings, even though the party was nationally known as anti-Catholic. While historians have largely concentrated on the Know Nothings' success in the North, Carriere furnishes a new context for the evolution of a national political movement at odds with its Louisiana constituents. Through statistics on various elections and demographics of Louisiana politicians, Carriere forms a detailed account of Louisiana's Know Nothing Party. The national and rapidly changing Louisiana political landscape yielded surprising, credible leverage for the Know Nothing movement. Slavery, Carriere argues, also played a crucial difference between southern and northern Know Nothing ideals. Carriere delineates the eventual downfall of the Know Nothing Party, while offering new perspectives on a nativist movement, which has appeared once again in a changing, divided country.
This book begins the comparative study of U.S. urban development during the first half of the 19th century. Breathtaking in its comprehensiveness, its survey and comparisons of early urban politics is without parallel. The study is based on a thorough examination of fifteen cities—Albany, Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Charleston, Cincinnati, Louisville, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, St. Louis, and Washington. This group of cities—the fifteen largest in 1850—provides a good mix of northern and southern, eastern and western, old and new, and fast- and slow-growing urban centers. This volume deals with the city as a corporate entity and contains chapters on urban governmental structures, government finance, politics and elections, urban political leadership, the city plan and city planning, intergovernmental relations, and urban mercantilism.
In July 1862, Union Lieutenant Stephen Spalding wrote a long letter from his post in Algiers, Louisiana, to his former college roommate. Equally fascinating and unsettling for modern readers, the comic cynicism of the young soldier’s correspondence offers an unusually candid and intimate account of military life and social change on the southern front. A captivating primary source, Spalding’s letter is reproduced here for the first time, along with contextual analysis and biographical detail, by Michael D. Pierson. Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana lifts the curtain on the twenty-two-year-old’s elitist social attitudes and his consuming ambition, examining the mind of a man of privilege as he turns to humor to cope with unwelcome realities. Spalding and his correspondent, James Peck, both graduates of the University of Vermont, lived in a society dominated by elite young men, with advantages granted by wealth, gender, race, and birth. Caught in the middle of the Civil War, Spalding adopts a light-hearted tone in his letter, both to mask his most intimate thoughts and fears and distance himself from those he perceives as social inferiors. His jokes show us an unpleasantly stratified America, with blacks, women, and the men in the ranks subjected to ridicule and even physical abuse by an officer with more assertiveness than experience. His longest story, a wild escapade in New Orleans that included abundant drinking and visits to two brothels, gives us a glimpse of a world in which men bonded through excess and indulgence. More poignantly, tactless jests about death, told as his unit suffers its first casualties, reveal a man struggling to come to terms with mortality. Evidence of Spalding’s unfulfilled aspirations, like his sometimes disturbing wit, allows readers to see past his entitlement to his human weaknesses. An engrossing picture of a charismatic but flawed young officer, Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana offers new ways to look at the society that shaped him.
The public health movement in the South began in the wake of a yellow fever epidemic that devastated the lower Mississippi Valley in 1878—a disaster that caused 20,000 deaths and financial losses of nearly $200 million. The full scale of the epidemic and the tentative, troubled southern response to it are for the first time fully examined by John Ellis in this new book. At the national level, southern congressional leaders fought to establish a strong federal health agency, but they were defeated by the young American Public Health Association, which defended states' rights. Local responses and results were mixed. In New Orleans, business and professional men, reacting to the denunciation of the city as the nation's pesthole, organized in 1879 to improve drainage, garbage disposal, and water supplies through voluntary subscription. Their achievements were of necessity modest. In Memphis—the city hardest hit by the epidemic—a new municipal government in 1879 helped form the first regional health organization and during the 1880s led the nation in sanitary improvements. In Atlanta, though it largely escaped the epidemic, the Constitution and some citizens called for health reform. Ironically their voices were drowned out by ritual invocation of local health mythology and by unabashed exploitation of the stigma of pestilence attached to New Orleans and Memphis. By 1890 Atlanta rivaled Charleston and Richmond for primacy in black mortality rates. That the public health movement met with only limited success Ellis attributes to the prevailing atmosphere of opportunistic greed, overwhelming debt, economic instability, and inordinate political corruption. But the effort to combat a terrifying disease not fully understood did eventually produce changes and the vastly improved health systems of today.
The Louisiana Governors is a one-volume reference work on the diverse, frequently colorful leaders of Louisiana since the eighteenth century. From Iberville to Edwards, this biographical directory provides a comprehensive look into the lives of sixty-six men who have wielded their political power in molding the history of the state. Joseph G. Dawson’s introduction sets the stage for this knowledgeable look at Louisiana’s governors by examining the historical evolution of the governorship over the past three centuries. Dawson focuses not only on the evolution of the office but also on the dominant personalities who have served it and the ever changing constitutions that have guided it. For the first time, students of Louisiana history will have at their disposal a chronological compilation of scholarly essays on the lives of the men who have served at Louisiana’s chief executive. Providing first a short biographical sketch of the governor under consideration, each essay includes an analytical discussion of the governor’s administration and of his role in the state’s history. A bibliography pertaining to the governor and his era follows each essay. The Louisiana Governors describes in rich detail the influence of French and Spanish colonial governors on Louisiana’s leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rivalry that now exists between the chief executive and the legislature, as well as the factionalism that has surfaced in the political system, is directly rooted in the state’s colonial past. It has been said that Louisianians like their politicians like their food—hot and spicy. They have not been disappointed. From the Lemoyne brothers, Iberville and Bienville, of the French colonial era, to the Long brothers, Huey and Earl, of the twentieth century, Louisiana’s governors have attracted ardent loyalty and vigorous criticism simultaneously. They have been hailed by critics as dictators, political mavericks, puppets, and even rubber-stamp governors. But whether weak or powerful, charismatic or unimposing, these men have braved controversy and political turmoil to create a governorship steeped in tradition.
This study examines the crucial role of merchants in the rise and decline of New Orleans during the nineteenth century.
How American Jesuits helped forge modern Catholicism around the world At the start of the nineteenth century, the Jesuits seemed fated for oblivion. Dissolved as a religious order in 1773 by one pope, they were restored in 1814 by another, but with only six hundred aged members. Yet a century later, the Jesuits numbered seventeen thousand men and were at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s expansion around the world. This book traces this nineteenth-century resurgence, showing how Jesuits nurtured a Catholic modernity through a disciplined counterculture of parishes, schools, and associations. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, American Jesuits and the World tracks Jesuits who left Europe for America and Jesuits who left the United States for missionary ventures across the Pacific. Each chapter tells the story of a revealing or controversial event, including the tarring and feathering of an exiled Swiss Jesuit in Maine, the efforts of French Jesuits in Louisiana to obtain Vatican approval of a miraculous healing, and the educational efforts of American Jesuits in Manila. These stories reveal how the Jesuits not only revived their own order but made modern Catholicism more global. The result is a major contribution to modern global history and an invaluable examination of the meaning of religious liberty in a pluralistic age.