Louisiana
Louisiana is a state in the Deep South region of the South Central United States. It is the 25th most populous of the 50 United States. Louisiana is bordered by the state of Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east, the Gulf of Mexico to the south. A large part of its eastern boundary is demarcated by the Mississippi River. Louisiana is the only U. S. state with political subdivisions termed parishes. The state's capital is Baton Rouge, its largest city is New Orleans. Much of the state's lands were formed from sediment washed down the Mississippi River, leaving enormous deltas and vast areas of coastal marsh and swamp; these contain a rich southern biota. There are many species of tree frogs, fish such as sturgeon and paddlefish. In more elevated areas, fire is a natural process in the landscape, has produced extensive areas of longleaf pine forest and wet savannas; these support an exceptionally large number of plant species, including many species of terrestrial orchids and carnivorous plants.
Louisiana has more Native American tribes than any other southern state, including four that are federally recognized, ten that are state recognized, four that have not received recognition. Some Louisiana urban environments have a multicultural, multilingual heritage, being so influenced by a mixture of 18th-century French, Spanish, Native American, African cultures that they are considered to be exceptional in the US. Before the American purchase of the territory in 1803, present-day Louisiana State had been both a French colony and for a brief period a Spanish one. In addition, colonists imported numerous African people as slaves in the 18th century. Many came from peoples of the same region of West Africa. In the post-Civil War environment, Anglo-Americans increased the pressure for Anglicization, in 1921, English was for a time made the sole language of instruction in Louisiana schools before a policy of multilingualism was revived in 1974. There has never been an official language in Louisiana, the state constitution enumerates "the right of the people to preserve and promote their respective historic and cultural origins."
Louisiana was named after Louis XIV, King of France from 1643 to 1715. When René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed the territory drained by the Mississippi River for France, he named it La Louisiane; the suffix -ana is a Latin suffix that can refer to "information relating to a particular individual, subject, or place." Thus Louis + ana carries the idea of "related to Louis." Once part of the French Colonial Empire, the Louisiana Territory stretched from present-day Mobile Bay to just north of the present-day Canada–United States border, including a small part of what is now the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Gulf of Mexico did not exist 250 million years ago when there was but one supercontinent, Pangea; as Pangea split apart, the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico opened. Louisiana developed, over millions of years, from water into land, from north to south; the oldest rocks are exposed in areas such as the Kisatchie National Forest. The oldest rocks date back to the early Cenozoic Era, some 60 million years ago.
The history of the formation of these rocks can be found in D. Spearing's Roadside Geology of Louisiana; the youngest parts of the state were formed during the last 12,000 years as successive deltas of the Mississippi River: the Maringouin, Teche, St. Bernard, the modern Mississippi, now the Atchafalaya; the sediments were carried from north to south by the Mississippi River. In between the Tertiary rocks of the north, the new sediments along the coast, is a vast belt known as the Pleistocene Terraces, their age and distribution can be related to the rise and fall of sea levels during past ice ages. In general, the northern terraces have had sufficient time for rivers to cut deep channels, while the newer terraces tend to be much flatter. Salt domes are found in Louisiana, their origin can be traced back to the early Gulf of Mexico, when the shallow ocean had high rates of evaporation. There are several hundred salt domes in the state. Salt domes are important not only as a source of salt. Louisiana is bordered to the west by Texas.
The state may properly be divided into two parts, the uplands of the north, the alluvial along the coast. The alluvial region includes low swamp lands, coastal marshlands and beaches, barrier islands that cover about 20,000 square miles; this area lies principally along the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River, which traverses the state from north to south for a distance of about 600 mi ) and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The breadth of the alluvial region along the Mississippi is from 10 to 60 miles, along the other rivers, the alluvial region averages about 10 miles across; the Mississippi River flows along a ridge formed by its own natural deposits, from which the lands decline toward a river beyond at an average fall of six feet per mile. The alluvial lands along other streams present similar features; the higher and contiguous hill lands of the north and northwestern part of the state have an area of more than 25,000 square miles. They consist of prairie and woodl
Planter class
The planter class, known alternatively in the United States as the Southern aristocracy, was a socio-economic caste of Pan-American society that dominated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century agricultural markets through the forced labor of enslaved Africans. The Atlantic slave trade permitted planters access to inexpensive labor for the planting and harvesting of crops such as tobacco, indigo, tea, sugar cane, oil seeds, oil palms,hemp, rubber trees, fruits. In the American South, planters maintained a distinct culture characterized by its similarity to the manners and customs of the British nobility, whom many planters were related to, with an emphasis on chivalry and hospitality, the latter becoming a marked trait of modern Southern society; this southern culture with its landed gentry was distinctly different from areas north of the Mason–Dixon line and west of the Appalachians that were characterized by small land holdings worked by yeoman farmers without slave labor. After the American Civil War, many in this class saw their wealth reduced as the enslaved Africans were freed.
Union forces under Generals William T. Sherman and Phillip Sheridan had cut wide swaths of destruction through portions of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia destroying crops, killing or confiscating livestock, burning barns and gristmills, in some cases torching plantation houses and entire cities such as Atlanta in scorched earth tactics designed to starve the Confederacy into submission. After emancipation, many plantations were converted to sharecropping with freed Africans working as sharecroppers on the same land they had worked as slaves before the war. During the Gilded Age many plantations, no longer viable as agricultural operations, were purchased by wealthy northern industrialists as hunting retreats; some plantations became museums on the U. S. National Register of Historic Places. Planters were prolific throughout the British, French and Spanish colonies of North and South America, the West Indies. Members of this class include colonists Robert "King" Carter, William Byrd of Westover, many signers of the Declaration of Independence including Benjamin Harrison V, Thomas Nelson, Jr. George Wythe, Carter Braxton and Richard Henry Lee, Founding Fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Valcour Aime, Sallie Ward, the fictional Scarlett O'Hara from the movie Gone with the Wind.
The search for gold and silver was a constant theme in overseas expansion, but there were other European demands the New World could satisfy, which contributed to its growing involvement in the Western-dominated world economy. While Spanish America seemed to fulfill dreams of mineral wealth, Brazil became the first major plantation colony in 1532, organized to produce a tropical crop – sugar – in great demand and short supply in Europe; the other major powers, England and the Netherlands, soon thereafter hoped to establish profitable colonies of their own. Presented with new opportunities, Europeans disenchanted by the rigid social structures of feudalism emigrated to the abundant virginal lands of the colonial frontier. Arriving through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, settlers landed on the shores of an unspoiled and hostile countryside. Early planters first began as colony farmers providing for the needs of settlements besieged by famine and tribal raids. Native Americans friendly to the colonists taught them to cultivate native plant species including tobacco and fruits, which within a century would become a global industry itself funding a multinational slave trade.
Colonial politics would come to be dominated by wealthy noble landowners interested in commercial development. In an effort to reduce the financial burden of continental wars, European governments began instituting land pension systems by which a soldier an officer, would be granted land in the colonies for services rendered; this incentivized military professionals to settle in the Americas and thus contribute to colonial defense against foreign colonists and hostile Natives. John Rolfe, a settler from Jamestown, was the first colonist to grow tobacco in North America, he arrived in Virginia with tobacco seeds procured from an earlier voyage to Trinidad, in 1612 harvested his inaugural crop for sale on the European market. During the 17th century, the Chesapeake Bay area was immensely hospitable to tobacco cultivation. Ships annually hauled 1.5 million pounds of tobacco out to the Bay by the 1630s, about 40 million pounds by the end of the century. Tobacco planters financed their operations with loans from London.
When tobacco prices dropped precipitously in the 1750s, many plantations struggled to remain financially solvent. In an effort to combat financial ruin planters either pushed to increase crop yield or, with the depletion of soil nutrients, converted to growing other crops such as cotton or wheat. In 1720, coffee was first introduced to the West Indies by French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu, who procured a coffee plant seedling from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Paris and transported it to Martinique, he transplanted it on the slopes of Mount Pelée and was able to harvest his first crop in 1726, or shortly thereafter. Within fifty years there were 18,000 coffee trees in Martinique enabling the spread of coffee cultivation to Saint-Domingue, New Spain and other islands of the Caribbean; the French territory of Saint-Domingue began cultivating coffee in 1734, by 1788 supplied half the global market. The French colonial plantations relied on African slave laborers. However, the harsh conditions that slav
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples known as first peoples, aboriginal peoples or native peoples, are ethnic groups who are the original settlers of a given region, in contrast to groups that have settled, occupied or colonized the area more recently. Groups are described as indigenous when they maintain traditions or other aspects of an early culture, associated with a given region. Not all indigenous peoples share this characteristic, as many have adopted substantial elements of a colonizing culture, such as dress, religion or language. Indigenous peoples may be settled in a given region or exhibit a nomadic lifestyle across a large territory, but they are historically associated with a specific territory on which they depend. Indigenous societies are found in every inhabited climate continent of the world. Since indigenous peoples are faced with threats to their sovereignty, economic well-being and their access to the resources on which their cultures depend, political rights have been set forth in international law by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank.
The United Nations has issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to guide member-state national policies to the collective rights of indigenous peoples, such as culture, identity and access to employment, health and natural resources. Estimates put the total population of indigenous peoples from 220 million to 350 million. International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples is celebrated on 9 August each year; the adjective indigenous was used to describe animals and plant origins. During the late twentieth century, the term Indigenous people began to be used to describe a legal category in indigenous law created in international and national legislations, it is derived from the Latin word indigena, based on the root gen-'to be born' with an archaic form of the prefix in'in'. Notably, the origins of the term indigenous is not related in any way to the origins of the term Indian which until was applied to indigenous peoples of the Americas. Any given people, ethnic group or community may be described as indigenous in reference to some particular region or location that they see as their traditional indigenous land claim.
Other terms used to refer to indigenous populations are aboriginal, original, or first. The use of the term peoples in association with the indigenous is derived from the 19th century anthropological and ethnographic disciplines that Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as "a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship, which have common language and beliefs, constitute a politically organized group". James Anaya, former Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, has defined indigenous peoples as "living descendants of pre-invasion inhabitants of lands now dominated by others, they are culturally distinct groups that find themselves engulfed by other settler societies born of forces of empire and conquest". They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.
The International Day of the World's Indigenous People falls on 9 August as this was the date of the first meeting in 1982 of the United Nations Working Group of Indigenous Populations of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the Commission on Human Rights. Throughout history, different states designate the groups within their boundaries that are recognized as indigenous peoples according to international or national legislation by different terms. Indigenous people include people indigenous based on their descent from populations that inhabited the country when non-indigenous religions and cultures arrived—or at the establishment of present state boundaries—who retain some or all of their own social, economic and political institutions, but who may have been displaced from their traditional domains or who may have resettled outside their ancestral domains; the status of the indigenous groups in the subjugated relationship can be characterized in most instances as an marginalized, isolated or minimally participative one, in comparison to majority groups or the nation-state as a whole.
Their ability to influence and participate in the external policies that may exercise jurisdiction over their traditional lands and practices is frequently limited. This situation can persist in the case where the indigenous population outnumbers that of the other inhabitants of the region or state. In a ground-breaking 1997 decision involving the Ainu people of Japan, the Japanese courts recognised their claim in law, stating that "If one minority group lived in an area prior to being ruled over by a majority group and preserved its distinct ethnic culture after being ruled over by the majority group, while another came to live in an area ruled over by a majority after consenting to the majority rule, it must be recognised that it is only natural that the distinct ethnic culture of the former group requires greater consideration."In Russia, definition of "indigenous peoples" is contested referring to a number of population (less
Union (American Civil War)
During the American Civil War, the Union known as the North, referred to the United States of America and to the national government of President Abraham Lincoln and the 20 free states, as well as 4 border and slave states that supported it. The Union was opposed by 11 southern slave states that formed the Confederate States of America known as "the Confederacy" or "the South". All of the Union's states provided soldiers for the United States Army, though the border areas sent tens of thousands of soldiers south into the Confederacy; the Border states were essential as a supply base for the Union invasion of the Confederacy, Lincoln realized he could not win the war without control of them Maryland, which lay north of the national capital of Washington, D. C.. The Northeast and upper Midwest provided the industrial resources for a mechanized war producing large quantities of munitions and supplies, as well as financing for the war; the Midwest provided soldiers, horses, financial support, training camps.
Army hospitals were set up across the Union. Most states had Republican Party governors who energetically supported the war effort and suppressed anti-war subversion in 1863–64; the Democratic Party supported the war at the beginning in 1861 but by 1862, was split between the War Democrats and the anti-war element led by the "Copperheads". The Democrats made major electoral gains in 1862 in state elections, most notably in New York, they lost ground in 1863 in Ohio. In 1864, the Republicans campaigned under the National Union Party banner, which attracted many War Democrats and soldiers and scored a landslide victory for Lincoln and his entire ticket against opposition candidate George B. McClellan, former General-in-Chief of the Union Army and its eastern Army of the Potomac; the war years were quite prosperous except where serious fighting and guerrilla warfare took place along the southern border. Prosperity was stimulated by heavy government spending and the creation of an new national banking system.
The Union states invested a great deal of money and effort in organizing psychological and social support for soldiers' wives and orphans, for the soldiers themselves. Most soldiers were volunteers, although after 1862 many volunteered in order to escape the draft and to take advantage of generous cash bounties on offer from states and localities. Draft resistance was notable in some larger cities New York City with its massive anti-draft riots of July 1863 and in some remote districts such as the coal mining areas of Pennsylvania. In the context of the American Civil War, the Union is sometimes referred to as "the North", both and now, as opposed to the Confederacy, "the South"; the Union never recognized the legitimacy of the Confederacy's secession and maintained at all times that it remained a part of the United States of America. In foreign affairs the Union was the only side recognized by all other nations, none of which recognized the Confederate government; the term "Union" occurs in the first governing document of the United States, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
The subsequent Constitution of 1787 was issued and ratified in the name not of the states, but of "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...". Union, for the United States of America, is repeated in such clauses as the Admission to the Union clause in Article IV, Section 3. Before the war started, the phrase "preserve the Union" was commonplace, a "union of states" had been used to refer to the entire United States of America. Using the term "Union" to apply to the non-secessionist side carried a connotation of legitimacy as the continuation of the pre-existing political entity. Confederates saw the Union states as being opposed to slavery referring to them as abolitionists, as in reference to the U. S. Navy as the "Abolition fleet" and the U. S. Army as the "Abolition forces". Unlike the Confederacy, the Union had a large industrialized and urbanized area, more advanced commercial and financial systems than the rural South. Additionally, the Union states had a manpower advantage of 5 to 2 at the start of the war.
Year by year, the Confederacy shrank and lost control of increasing quantities of resources and population. Meanwhile, the Union turned its growing potential advantage into a much stronger military force. However, much of the Union strength had to be used to garrison conquered areas, to protect railroads and other vital points; the Union's great advantages in population and industry would prove to be vital long-term factors in its victory over the Confederacy, but it took the Union a long while to mobilize these resources. The attack on Fort Sumter rallied the North to the defense of American nationalism. Historian, Allan Nevins, says: The thunderclap of Sumter produced a startling crystallization of Northern sentiment... Anger swept the land. From every side came news of mass meetings, resolutions, tenders of business support, the muster of companies and regiments, the determined action of governors and legislatures. McClintock states: At the time, Northerners were right to wonder at the near unanimity that so followed long months of bitterness and discord.
It would not last throughout the protracted war to come – or through the year – but in that moment of unity was laid bare the common Northern nationalism hidden by the fierce battles more typical of the political arena." Historian Michael Smith, argues that, as the war grou
Acadia
Acadia was a colony of New France in northeastern North America that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces, modern-day Maine to the Kennebec River. During much of the 17th and early 18th centuries, Norridgewock on the Kennebec River and Castine at the end of the Penobscot River were the southernmost settlements of Acadia; the actual specification by the French government for the territory refers to lands bordering the Atlantic coast between the 40th and 46th parallels. The territory was divided into the British colonies that became Canadian provinces and American states; the population of Acadia included members of the Wabanaki Confederacy and descendants of emigrants from France. The two communities intermarried, which resulted in a significant portion of the population of Acadia being Métis; the first capital of Acadia, established in 1605, was Port-Royal. A British force from Virginia attacked and burned down the town in 1613, but it was rebuilt nearby, where it remained the longest serving capital of French Acadia until the British Siege of Port Royal in 1710.
Over seventy-four years there were six colonial wars, in which English and British interests tried to capture Acadia starting with King William's War in 1689. During these wars, along with some French troops from Quebec, some Acadians, the Wabanaki Confederacy, French priests continuously raided New England settlements along the border in Maine. While Acadia was conquered in 1710 during Queen Anne's War, present-day New Brunswick and much of Maine remained contested territory. Present-day Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton as agreed under Article XIII of the Treaty of Utrecht remained under French control. By militarily defeating the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French priests, present-day Maine fell during Father Rale's War. During King George's War and New France made significant attempts to regain mainland Nova Scotia. After Father Le Loutre's War, present-day New Brunswick fell to the British. During the French and Indian War, both Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean fell to the British in 1758.
Today, the term Acadia is used to refer to regions of North America that are associated with the lands, descendants, or culture of the former French region. It refers to regions of The Maritimes with French roots and culture in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands and Prince Edward Island, as well as in Maine, it can be used to refer to the Acadian diaspora in southern Louisiana, a region referred to as Acadiana. In the abstract, Acadia refers to the existence of a French culture in any of these regions. People living in Acadia, sometimes former residents and their descendants, are called Acadians later known as Cajuns, the English pronunciation of'Cadiens, after resettlement in Louisiana; the origin of the designation Acadia is credited to the explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who on his 16th-century map applied the ancient Greek name "Arcadia" to the entire Atlantic coast north of Virginia. "Arcadia" derives from the Arcadia district in Greece, which since Classical antiquity had the extended meanings of "refuge" or "idyllic place".
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says: "Arcadia, the name Verrazzano gave to Maryland or Virginia'on account of the beauty of the trees,' made its first cartographical appearance in the 1548 Gastaldo map and is the only name on that map to survive in Canadian usage." In 1603 a colony south of the St. Lawrence River between the 40th and 46th parallels was chartered by Henry IV, who recognized the territory as La Cadie. In the 17th century, Samuel de Champlain fixed its present orthography with the r omitted. William Francis Ganong, a cartographer, has shown its gradual progress northeastwards, in a succession of maps, to its resting place in the Atlantic provinces of Canada. Of note is the similarity in the pronunciation of Acadie and the Míkmawísimk suffix -akadie, which means "a place of abundance." The modern usage is still seen in place names such as Shubenacadie. It is thought that intercultural conversation between early French traders and Mi'kmaq hunters may have resulted in the name l'Arcadie being changed to l'Acadie.
The borders of French Acadia have never been defined, but the following areas were at some time part of French Acadia: Present-day Nova Scotia with as capital Port Royal. Lost to Great Britain in 1713. Present-day New Brunswick, which remained part of Nova Scotia until 1784 until becoming its own colony in 1785. Île-Royale Cape Breton Island, with the Fortress of Louisbourg. Lost to Great Britain in 1763. Île Saint-Jean Prince Edward Island. Lost to Great Britain in 1763; the part of present-day Maine east of the Kennebec River. Became part of the New England Colonies in 1727; the history of Acadia was influenced by the warfare that took place on its soil during the 17th and 18th century. Prior to that time period, the Mi'kmaq lived in Acadia for centuries; the French arrived in 1604. Despite this, the Mi'kmaq tolerated the presence of the French in exchange for favours and trade. Catholic Mi'kmaq and Acadians were the predominant populations in the colony for the next 150 years. Early European colonists, who would become known as Acadians, were French subjects from the Pleumartin to Poitiers in the Vienne département of west-central France.
The first French settlement was established by Pierre Dugua des Monts, Governor of Acadia, under the authority of King H
Plantations in the American South
Plantations are an important aspect of the history of the American South the antebellum era. The mild subtropical climate, plentiful rainfall, fertile soils of the southeastern United States allowed the flourishing of large plantations, where large numbers of workers Africans held captive for slave labor, were required for agricultural production. An individual who owned a plantation was known as a planter. Historians of the antebellum South have defined "planter" most as a person owning property and 20 or more slaves; the wealthiest planters, such as the Virginia elite with plantations near the James River, owned more land and slaves than other farmers. Tobacco was the major cash crop in the Upper South; the development of cotton and sugar cultivation in the Deep South in the early 18th century led to the establishment of large plantations which had hundreds of slaves. The great majority of Southern farmers owned fewer than five slaves. Slaves were much more expensive than land. In the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama and Mississippi, the terms "planter" and "farmer" were synonymous.
While most Southerners were not slave-owners, while the majority of slaveholders held ten or fewer slaves, planters were those who held a significant number of slaves as agricultural labor. Planters are spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or to the planter aristocracy in the antebellum South; the historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman define large planters as those owning over 50 slaves, medium planters as those owning between 16 and 50 slaves. Historian David Williams, in A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom, suggests that the minimum requirement for planter status was twenty negroes since a southern planter could exempt Confederate duty for one white male per twenty slaves owned. In his study of Black Belt counties in Alabama, Jonathan Weiner defines planters by ownership of real property, rather than of slaves. A planter, for Weiner, owned at least $10,000 worth of real estate in 1850 and $32,000 worth in 1860, equivalent to about the top 8 percent of landowners.
In his study of southwest Georgia, Lee Formwalt defines planters in terms of size of land holdings rather than in terms of numbers of slaves. Formwalt's planters are in the top 4.5 percent of landowners, translating into real estate worth six thousand dollars or more in 1850, 24,000 dollars or more in 1860, eleven thousand dollars or more in 1870. In his study of Harrison County, Randolph B. Campbell classifies large planters as owners of 20 slaves, small planters as owners of between 10 and 19 slaves. In Chicot and Phillips Counties, Carl H. Moneyhon defines large planters as owners of twenty or more slaves, of six hundred or more acres. Many nostalgic memoirs about plantation life were published in the post-bellum South. For example, James Battle Avirett, who grew up on the Avirett-Stephens Plantation in Onslow County, North Carolina and served as an Episcopal chaplain in the Confederate States Army, published The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin before the War in 1901.
Such memoirs included descriptions of Christmas as the epitome of anti-modern order exemplified by the "great house" and extended family. On larger plantations an overseer represented the planter in matters of daily management. Portrayed as uncouth, ill-educated and low-class, he had the difficult and despised task of middleman and the contradictory goals of fostering both productivity and the enslaved work-force. Crops cultivated on antebellum plantations included cotton, sugar, rice, to a lesser extent okra, sweet potato and watermelon. By the late 18th century, most planters in the Upper South had switched from exclusive tobacco cultivation to mixed-crop production. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina before the American Revolution, planters in South Carolina owned hundreds of slaves; the 19th-century development of the Deep South for cotton cultivation depended on large tracts of land with much more acreage than was typical of the Chesapeake Bay area, for labor, planters held dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of slaves.
Antebellum architecture can be seen in many extant "plantation houses", the large residences of planters and their families. Over time in each region of the plantation south a regional architecture emerged inspired by those who settled the area. Most early plantation architecture was constructed to mitigate the hot subtropical climate and provide natural cooling; some of earliest plantation architecture occurred in southern Louisiana by the French. Using styles and building concepts they had learned in the Caribbean, the French created many of the grand plantation homes around New Orleans. French Creole architecture began around 1699, lasted well into the 1800s. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, the Dogtrot style house was built with a large center breezeway running through the house to mitigate the subtropical heat; the wealthiest planters in colonial Virginia constructed their manor houses in the Georgian style, e.g. the mansion of Shirley Plantation. In the 19th century, Greek Revival architecture became popular on some of the plantation homes of the deep south.
Common plants and trees incorporated in the landscape of Southern plantation manors included Southern live oak and Southern magnolia. Both of these large trees are native to the Southern United States and were classic sym
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the Louisiana territory of New France by the United States from France in 1803. The U. S. paid fifty million francs and a cancellation of debts worth eighteen million francs for a total of sixty-eight million francs. The Louisiana territory included land from fifteen present U. S. states and two Canadian provinces. The territory contained land that forms Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Nebraska, its non-native population was around 60,000 inhabitants. The Kingdom of France controlled the Louisiana territory from 1699 until it was ceded to Spain in 1762. In 1800, Napoleon the First Consul of the French Republic, hoping to re-establish an empire in North America, regained ownership of Louisiana. However, France's failure to put down the revolt in Saint-Domingue, coupled with the prospect of renewed warfare with the United Kingdom, prompted Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States to fund his military; the Americans sought to purchase only the port city of New Orleans and its adjacent coastal lands, but accepted the bargain.
The Louisiana Purchase occurred during the term of the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Before the purchase was finalized, the decision faced Federalist Party opposition. Jefferson agreed that the U. S. Constitution did not contain explicit provisions for acquiring territory, but he asserted that his constitutional power to negotiate treaties was sufficient. Throughout the second half of the 18th century, Louisiana was a pawn on the chessboard of European politics, it was controlled by the French, who had a few small settlements along the Mississippi and other main rivers. France ceded the territory to Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau. Following French defeat in the Seven Years' War, Spain gained control of the territory west of the Mississippi and the British the territory to the east of the river. Following the establishment of the United States, the Americans controlled the area east of the Mississippi and north of New Orleans; the main issue for the Americans was free transit of the Mississippi to the sea.
As the lands were being settled by a few American migrants, many Americans, including Jefferson, assumed that the territory would be acquired "piece by piece." The risk of another power taking it from a weakened Spain made a "profound reconsideration" of this policy necessary. New Orleans was important for shipping agricultural goods to and from the areas of the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains. Pinckney's Treaty, signed with Spain on October 27, 1795, gave American merchants "right of deposit" in New Orleans, granting them use of the port to store goods for export. Americans used this right to transport products such as flour, pork, lard, cider and cheese; the treaty recognized American rights to navigate the entire Mississippi, which had become vital to the growing trade of the western territories. In 1798, Spain revoked the treaty allowing American use of New Orleans upsetting Americans. In 1801, Spanish Governor Don Juan Manuel de Salcedo took over from the Marquess of Casa Calvo, restored the American right to deposit goods.
However, in 1800 Spain had ceded the Louisiana territory back to France as part of Napoleon's secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso. The territory nominally remained under Spanish control, until a transfer of power to France on November 30, 1803, just three weeks before the formal cession of the territory to the United States on December 20, 1803. A further ceremony was held in Upper Louisiana regarding the New Orleans formalities; the March 9–10, 1804 event is remembered as Three Flags Day. James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston had traveled to Paris to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans in January 1803, their instructions were to purchase control of New Orleans and its environs. The Louisiana Purchase was by far the largest territorial gain in U. S. history. Stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, the purchase doubled the size of the United States. Before 1803, Louisiana had been under Spanish control for forty years. Although Spain aided the rebels in the American Revolutionary War, the Spanish didn't want the Americans to settle in their territory.
Although the purchase was thought of by some as unjust and unconstitutional, Jefferson determined that his constitutional power to negotiate treaties allowed the purchase of what became fifteen states. In hindsight, the Louisiana Purchase could be considered one of his greatest contributions to the United States. On April 18, 1802, Jefferson penned a letter to United States Ambassador to France Robert Livingston, it was an intentional exhortation to make this mild diplomat warn the French of their perilous course. The letter began: The cession of Louisiana and the Floridas by Spain to France works most sorely on the U. S. On this subject the Secretary of State has written to you fully, yet I cannot forbear recurring to it s
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