Blog Carnival- Louisiana: Closed For Remodeling by Greg Peters
August 23rd, 2008 by Loki
(For a complete and updated list of all Blog Carnival Posts visit this page.)
What the fuck happened? Or, in pukka: Why are we they way we are?
Pirates, mostly. Privateers, if you want to split hairs.
Look, I’m not *blaming* anything on pirates. I like pirates. But the fact is, it was Jean Laffite who provided the tipping point after which Louisiana started the long slow slide.
Laffite, for you out of towners, was a privateer (that is, a pirate with a license). He and his brother roared around the gulf near the turn of the nineteenth century, liberating the contents of ships of all nations and carting them back to the island nation of Saint-Domingue, from which they were transferred (okay, smuggled) into New Orleans.
In 1808, however, the Louisiana government (such as it was) decided to start enforcing the Embargo Act of 1807, which barred any American ship from docking at a foreign port. Saint-Domingue was now problematic, so Laffite moved his operation to Barataria, near Grand Isle in Barataria Bay. Once unloaded there, the swag was transported to New Orleans through the bayou via pirogue (that’s a boat for your corn farmers). Read the rest of this entry »
