Irvin Mayfield, Jazz Musician: The Constitution resides somewhere else, but the constitution of music resides here. The constitution of food resides here. The constitution of art resides here.
Tom Piazza, Writer: You do learn very quickly with New Orleans that if you're going to love it you have to love it with its flaws. It suffers from terrible poverty, terrible crime, but if you love something, you love it for what it is, not for what you wish it would be.
Ari Kelman, Historian: New Orleans is such an alluring place. The city really has become kind of embedded in the American imagination as something that's wholly different from the rest of this country but at the same time representative of some of the best of what we are and some of the worst of what we are.
Irvin Mayfield, Jazz Musician: New Orleans is a very old city, with a lot of tradition, a lot of culture that is born out of ceremony. You can find history anywhere, but in New Orleans, it's kind of like we are always living the history. The history is being lived on a daily basis. People don't tell history, they do history.
John Scott, Writer: There is so much history and cultural richness in that city that it oozes up out of the sidewalk. You know, it's hard to be there and really be there and not begin to absorb that. Of all the places I've been in the world, New Orleans is the only place I've ever been, where if you listen, sidewalks will speak to you.
Narrator: When wealthy travelers set out to see America in the nineteenth century, only a handful of cities were considered essential stops on the itinerary -- and of those, none inspired more fascination than New Orleans.
"On arriving ... in the morning," one visitor remarked in 1819, "New Orleans has ... a very imposing and handsome appearance ... Everything has an odd look ... and I confess that ... it was impossible not to stare at a sight wholly new even to one who has traveled much in Europe and America."
Situated at a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi, about one hundred miles from its mouth, New Orleans was perched atop the river's natural levee -- a ribbon of high ground that sloped gently down from the water's edge for a mile or two, then gave way to dense, mosquito-infested Cypress swamp. Beyond the swamp to the north was Lake Pontchartrain, which led to the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans was a city surrounded by water.
Peirce Lewis, Geographer: If you think about North America the whole interior is drained by one of two river systems. One is the St. Lawrence by way of the Great Lakes, and the other is the Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri and the way to control the Mississippi and by the way, merely the whole interior of North America, southern part of the interior, was New Orleans. There had to be a city there, even though the site was...was dicey.
Ari Kelman, Historian: On the one hand it's the worst place imaginable to put a city. A good portion of the city is below sea level. In some cases, as much as ten or fifteen feet below sea level. It's a terrible disease environment; they've had horrible epidemics throughout their history. And of course they're on the path for these Gulf storms as they come up out of the Atlantic. On the other hand though, it's the best place imaginable to put a city, maybe the best place that you can imagine in the world to put a city.
Narrator: New Orleans had been founded as the capital of French Louisiana back in 1718, ceded to Spain and governed by her for nearly half a century, then briefly reclaimed by France -- all before finally being sold to the United States, as part of the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803.
To that point, most of the native-born inhabitants of New Orleans had been French-speaking Roman Catholics, who called themselves Creoles. Unlike the Cajuns, the French-Canadian immigrants who had settled in the Louisiana countryside, the Creoles were primarily urban people -- proudly Parisian in their manners and attitudes, and passionately devoted to the cultured enjoyment of life.
In the crowded colonial city, called the Vieux Carré -- or old square -- whites had lived side by side with blacks, among them Africans and people of mixed race, known variously as mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons.
Some of them were slaves; others the so-called "free people of color" -- many of them refugees from a bloody slave revolt in the former French colony of Haiti. Entitled to own property and operate their own businesses, the free people of color were by far the most prosperous black community in the United States.
Ari Kelman, Historian: The free people of color have their own cultural institutions. They have their own community. But at the same time they interact quite easily with the white power structure in the city. The kinds of clear separation that exist in other places in the United States just aren't present in New Orleans.
Raphael Cassimere, Jr., Historian: The amalgamation of the Africans and whites created basically one culture where everybody was accepted, belonged. It worked well because people kind of understood class structure. I mean even though you lived next door to somebody didn't necessarily mean that you are socially their equal. But free blacks as well as slaves had a place in society.
Narrator: Into this century-old city of some 7,000 people had come the Americans -- English-speaking, Protestant and accustomed to a rigid line between black and white. They had come pouring south from the eastern seaboard and the Kentucky hill country -- most of them bent on making money, and doing so in the American way.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: We came in and we wanted to impose our ways on an alternative European civilization. We wanted to impose the English language. We wanted to get rid of the local culture. So there was this struggle for the soul of New Orleans.
Narrator: By 1820, the Americans' commercial connections had made New Orleans a bustling entry port for bananas and coffee from Latin America; cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco from the plantations of the South; tens of thousands of slaves from Virginia.
Kalamu ya Salaam, Writer: New Orleans was the major international port in the South. It was the entry point for much of the traffic coming from Europe. It was the easiest way to export grain, and heavy manufactured goods, most of which were coming out of the Midwest and all of them end up passing New Orleans.
Narrator: "In a few years," one observer concluded, "this will be an American town ... and everything French will in time disappear." It was a prediction that never quite came true.
John Biguenet, Writer: The Americans were not given very serious regard. That prejudice persisted so long that my grandfather you know, 200 years after the Louisiana Purchase still called tourists the Americans, the Americans came every summer, he said.
Narrator: The Creoles' refusal to assimilate was so staunch that in the end, it would be etched into the map of the growing city.
Decades after the Americans' arrival, the Vieux Carré remained the nearly-exclusive territory of the Creoles. The newcomers were settled farther upriver, with their own business district, called the "American sector," and a neighborhood of stately homes that would come to be known the Garden District.
Street names changed as they crossed Canal, the so-called "neutral ground" between the French city and the American one -- and what was Chartres on one side became Camp on the other. Each side had its own opera house and its own churches, its own shipping canals, reservoirs and levees. And each had its own ruling class -- a small, select elite comprised of those who were both wealthy and white.
Meanwhile, as the port prospered, New Orleans lured immigrants from all over the world -- from France and the French colonies in the West Indies; from China and the Philippines, Ireland, Germany and Sicily.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, New Orleans would be home to some one hundred thousand people, forty percent of them foreign-born and more of mixed racial ancestry than anywhere else in the United States.
Ari Kelman, Historian: New Orleans is a place that never has a single truly dominant culture. You've got these French Creoles, this Creole elite in the city that doesn't want to lose power and you've got American newcomers who...who want power very, very badly. You've got again, slaves and free people of color. Then you've got people from all over the world and they all have to live sort of cheek by jowl. And it makes for a, a very, very complicated cultural dynamic and in some cases, very exciting cultural dynamic but one that also can be very, very explosive.
Narrator: Over the century to come, the many and varied peoples of New Orleans would struggle to live together -- contending with one another to sink roots in unstable soil. Along the way, they would make their city the site of a radical experiment in American democracy, one that would test whether diversity would prove a dangerous liability or a vital, creative force.