The big easy, the big prize: for centuries, New Orleans has been a strategically critical city coveted by European imperial powers and visionary American statesmen.

"I shall eat my Christmas dinner in New Orleans," boasted British Admiral Alexander Cochrane as soldiers under his command disembarked on the lower Mississippi on December 12, 1814. As the British troops, many of them hardened veterans of Wellington's campaigns against Napoleon, prepared for battle, it seemed likely that Great Britain would end its war against the upstart United States without suffering a single significant defeat. The U.S. campaign in Canada had ended disastrously, and the White House, along with much of the U.S. capital city, had been reduced to rubble by invading British troops. By seizing New Orleans, the British would control the Mississippi River and with it the vast interior of North America.

Informed of the admiral's boast by a captured British soldier, Major General Andrew Jackson smiled and offered a quiet but resolute reply. The British officer might very well enjoy a Christmas feast in New Orleans, Jackson said, "but I shall have the honor of presiding at that dinner." The first of three battles between British forces and Jackson's forces--built around militiamen from Tennessee and Kentucky, but including pirates led by Jean Lefitte--took place on December 23. On the following day, unbeknownst to the combatants, the United States and Great Britain signed a treaty in Ghent that had ended the war. News of the treaty didn't cross the Atlantic for several weeks. But it's likely the struggle for control of New Orleans would have continued even if the news had been made available instantly, given the city's unique geostrategic value.

Thus even as the U.S. peace commissioners made their way back from Ghent, the War of 1812 went into extra innings, with major battles being fought on January 1 and 8 of 1815. General Jackson's badly outnumbered force had dug in on very defensible ground in Chalmette, about five miles downriver from New Orleans. Ten thousand British troops under General Sir Edward Parkenham mounted three separate assaults against the Americans, only to be cut down on open ground by fierce rifle and artillery fire. General Parkenham himself was mortally wounded in the final assault.

As his life ebbed away, Parkenham ordered his replacement, General John Lambert, to continue the assault. Once in command, Lambert took a sober inventory of British losses: more than 700 had been killed, and some 2,000 or more had been wounded or taken prisoner. The Americans, on the other hand, had lost 13, with 58 wounded. Regretfully but realistically defying his fallen commander's final order, Lambert ordered a withdrawal, ending the British attempt to seize New Orleans and with it the Mississippi.

Key to the Mississippi

While Great Britain at the time remained the world's most formidable military power, its attention was divided between its conflict with the U.S. in the New World and its campaign to rein in Napoleon on the continent. In addition, the Americans had been preparing for military action along the Mississippi for more than a decade.

"From this date," proclaimed Juan Ventura Morales, Spain's acting Intendant of New Orleans, on October 16, 1802, "the privilege which the Americans had of importing and depositing their merchandise and effects in this capital, shall be interdicted," thereby effectively closing the Mississippi.

America's right to use the ports at New Orleans was guaranteed by the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain, under which the Spaniards could designate "another part of the banks of the Mississippi [as] an equivalent establishment." But suspicion soon flared throughout Kentucky and Ohio that the interdiction was a prelude to French seizure of New Orleans, and with it the Mississippi. Militia began to muster throughout the western states for a possible march on New Orleans to reopen the critical trade route by force.

"From whatever source the [interdiction] measure may have proceeded, the President expects that the Spanish Government will neither lose a moment in countermanding it, nor hesitate to repair every damage which may result from it," wrote then-Secretary of State James Madison. The growing militancy of U.S. citizens in the West, Madison insisted, "is justified by the interest they have at stake. The Mississippi is to them every thing. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic states formed into one stream."

Louisiana and the Mississippi had long preoccupied the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, as well. "The navigation of the Mississippi we must have," wrote Jefferson, at the time the American Emissary in Paris, in a 1786 letter to explorer Archibald Stuart. At the time, Louisiana and the Great River were under Spanish control.

Britain's victory in the French and Indian War--the American theater of a world conflict called Seven Years' War--resulted in France losing most of its North American empire in 1763. Prudently, Spain's King Carlos III had remained aloof from the war until late in the conflict. Part of his price for entering the war was Spanish control over Louisiana. Thanks to this timely agreement, Spain's North American empire in the mid-1700s North America was expanded to include nearly everything west of the Mississippi River and south of the Canadian border all the way to Tierra del Fuego, as well as most of the Caribbean islands.

While Spain's New World empire was geographically immense, Madrid's claim was tenuous and difficult to defend. Eager as he was to retain as much of his American possessions as possible, Carlos III was particularly zealous to keep Louisiana as a buffer to protect his empire's chief source of overseas wealth--the Zacatecas silver mine in Mexico City, the capital of New Spain. By 1786, Mexican silver bullion mined in Zacatecas provided almost exactly half the annual export trade of the entire Spanish Empire. And the key to controlling Louisiana was New Orleans.

"New Orleans had been built by military engineers at the southwest end of the French fur-trading empire that had stretched in a great imperial arc along the waterways of North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River," writes historian John Kukla in his recent book A Wilderness So Immense. "The walled cities of Quebec and New Orleans--separated by a canoe trip of thirty-two hundred miles--had been the citadels of New France." Louisiana was founded on April 9, 1682 under the direction of French explorer Robert Cavalier de La Salle, who "claimed the interior of the continent for Louis XIV and named it in his honor."

Strategic City

New Orleans "commanded the single most strategic point between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains of North America: the isthmus between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain known in the eighteenth century as the Isle of Orleans," notes Kukla. There two navigable waterways from the Gulf of Mexico to the Upper Mississippi converged.

By the 1770s, New Orleans had become a small but heavily fortified outpost guarding access to this vitally important waterway. During the American War of Independence, King Carlos III allowed Spanish officials in New Orleans to trade with the rebellious colonies, which allowed them to overcome a potentially critical shortfall in food production. This arrangement also whetted the Spaniards' appetite for free trade.

In 1780, Martin Navarro, Spain's Intendant for New Orleans, published a tract urging the Spanish Crown to cultivate commercial relations with the Anglo-Americans. Only by opening up trade channels would the Spanish colony overcome its persistent poverty, Navarro insisted. That indigence was made much worse by two devastating hurricanes that had leveled the city in the late 1770s.

Reflecting the observations of Adam Smith's recently published Wealth of Nations, Navarro advocated "a general, free, and common trade with any nation whatsoever ... by permitting the entrance into this river of [ships of] any flag, without distinction--the sole and only mode of causing this province to flourish, populate, and advance."

While Navarro was preaching laissez faire, the Spanish Crown--determined to preserve its buffer protecting the Mexican silver mines--was pursuing a different strategy. Sensible of the growing wealth and power of the young confederation that would become the United States, Spain offered the Continental Congress a very attractive package of trading privileges at its ports in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, as well as access to Spanish markets for New England's fishing industry. In exchange, Carlos III required an agreement closing the Mississippi to American boats and traders for a period of 25 to 30 years.

This offer, presented by American negotiator John Jay in a secretive meeting of the Congress, immediately inflamed sectional divisions within the confederation. Northeastern interests were understandably enraptured with the proposal; inhabitants of the southern and western states were outraged by it. If the deal were struck, warned Charles Pinckney, chosen to speak on behalf of the south, western settlers would be divided "entirely from us"; under those circumstances, they could not be blamed "for immediately throwing themselves into [Spain's] arms for that protection and support which you have denied them." This would result in the dissolution of the confederation--an arrangement actually favored by some northern delegates already seeking to forge their own regional arrangement.

The Articles of Confederation, and the loosely organized union it created, could not be altered without a unanimous vote. When the Spanish proposal came to a vote in August 1786, Congress was deadlocked five states to seven, with the division running strictly along regional lines.

Napoleon's Bargain

As long as Spain controlled Louisiana and America had i access to the wharves of New Orleans, the United States was happy to stand pat. By the dawn of the 19th century, "Spain was old and decrepit, growing weaker each year," notes historian Stephen Ambrose. "America was dynamic, growing stronger every day. The people who were going to transform the Mississippi Valley, from its source to New Orleans, into farms and villages would come from the United States, not from Spain." This changed in the spring of 1801, when President Jefferson learned of a secret pact between Napoleon and King Carlos IV of Spain (acting under severe duress) to transfer control of Louisiana to France.

"There is on the globe one spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy," complained Jefferson. "It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market." Although fond of France, Jefferson was a realist, and he recognized that control of New Orleans by Napoleon's regime--the offspring of Revolutionary Jacobin France--could not be countenanced. Any attempt to land French troops in Louisiana would trigger war with the U.S. that would "annihilate France on the ocean," because the U.S. would be forced to "marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation."

The possibility of war with France grew with the October 1802 decision by Juan Morales, Spanish Intendant of New Orleans, to revoke the right of American traders to deposit their merchandise--an action correctly seen by Americans as a prelude to a French occupation of the city.

At the time Napoleon forced the pact to reclaim Louisiana, his brother-in-law, General Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, was leading a punitive expedition to put down a slave uprising in St. Domingue (modern Haiti). Led by General Toussaint L'Ouverture, a self-educated man who had defended the French territory against England, the black Haitians fought a fierce insurrectionary campaign against Leclerc's occupation. Both sides invoked the totalitarian "ideals" of the French Revolution, with predictable results: unspeakable atrocities were routinely committed by both insurgents and occupiers. As many as 350,000 Haitians were slaughtered, along with an estimated 60,000 French soldiers, among them General Leclerc.

The Haiti expedition proved to be a huge setback for Napoleon's designs in North America. "Bonaparte envisaged sending several thousand French troops ahead to Louisiana," recalls Kukla. "That bright day never came, of course. The Haitian debacle swallowed up men and provisions originally intended for New Orleans." With a formidable British fleet plying the Gulf of Mexico and other conflicts vying for his attention, Napoleon grudgingly concluded that Louisiana was a gaudy prize he simply couldn't afford. "His decision to sell Louisiana stemmed from his realization that the dream of reviving the French empire in the Caribbean had indeed died with [his] brother-in-law General Leclerc," Kukla observes.

By April 1803--with the Haiti campaign still underway--the French dictator had decided to sell Louisiana to the Americans. "I renounce Louisiana," Napoleon informed Francois Barbe-Marbois, the French minister of finance. "It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without any reservation. I know the price of what I abandon, and I have sufficiently proved the importance that I attach to this province.... I renounce it with the greatest regret. To attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly."

At the time, Washington was steeling itself for war. U.S. envoy to France Robert Livingston, reflecting Jefferson's priorities, was interested in the purchase of New Orleans and the Floridas. James Monroe, who took over for Livingston, urged the same transaction in negotiations with Talleyrand--only to be shocked when he was offered the entire territory of Louisiana.

The settled price was eighty million francs, or about $15,000,000, financed for 20 years through the Barings Bank of London and Hope & Co. of Holland at six percent. The total price for a purchase that doubled the size of the United States was $23,527,872.57, or roughly four cents an acre.

The Louisiana Purchase was not an unmixed blessing. Jefferson, an exponent of strict constitutional construction and states' rights, was vividly aware of the fact that the Constitution--strictly read--did not authorize a territorial acquisition of this kind. Anglo-American leaders in both the north and the south were leery of absorbing Louisiana's polyglot population of Spanish and French Catholics, Indians, and Caribbean blacks. And acquisition of the Floridas prompted questions concerning the disposition of the region's Indian populations; as Kukla points out, "America's barely visible first steps along the Trail of Tears were taken in the White House as Thomas Jefferson pondered the implications of the Louisiana Purchase."

The Senate ratified the purchase in October 1803, and the U.S. claimed sovereignty over Louisiana in a New Orleans ceremony on December 20, 1803. Eventually, 13 states would be carved from the Louisiana Territory, and the Mississippi would be the chief artery of our nation's commercial expansion.

"The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies," observes geopolitical analyst George Friedman. "That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry."

"But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion," he continues. "Rather, it was geography--the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one--the Mississippi--and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargoes stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels.... [From 1803 to the present,] New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy." Spain, France, and England all coveted control of that critical pivot point, and had it fallen into the hands of any of those powers, modern America would not have come into being.